LONDON: A World Health Organization (WHO) has revealed that the ‘Remdesivir’, which was said to be a touted drug authorized for treatment of norovirus fails to prevent death among patients.
The study was conducted in 30 counties on more than 11,000 people. The researchers tried to treat a patient with the drug for 10 days, where each infected person received 200 milligrams dose on the first day and 100 mg dose on the following days.
Dr. Ilan Schwartz, an infectious-disease physician at the University of Alberta in Canada, said, “This puts the issue to rest there is certainly no mortality benefit.” However, Dr. Peter Chin-Hong, an infectious-disease expert at the University of California, San Francisco, was more circumspect.
Read more: 10% of world’s population may have had COVID-19: WHO
Remdesivir, the drug was granted emergency authorization following a trial by the National Institutes of Health, who discovered that it modestly reduced the time to recovery in severely ill patients.
That study, too, did not find that remdesivir prevented deaths in patients with coronavirus. The antiviral has become part of the standard of care for coronavirus us patients in the United States.
