[ad_1]
The World Health Organization has updated its current guidelines on Covid-19 drugs to advise against the use of the antiviral drug remdesivir to treat hospital patients, regardless of the severity of their illness.
According to the update, published Thursday in the medical journal BMJ, current evidence does not suggest that remdesivir affects the risk of dying from Covid-19 or needing mechanical ventilation, among other important findings.
The new WHO update comes about a month after Gilead Sciences, the makers of remdesivir, announced that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved remdesivir for the treatment of coronavirus infection. The drug became the first treatment for the coronavirus to receive FDA approval.
Remdesivir may have received FDA approval but not WHO recommendation due to emerging research – which initially showed some benefit against Covid-19, but as more and more data pile up, that seems to be changing, said Dr Amesh Adalja, a senior researcher at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, who was not involved in the WHO guidelines.
“We’ve seen people realize that the benefit of remdesivir is marginal at best – and maybe the only benefit we were touting was that it improves people faster. Which we’re seeing reflected in the guidelines. ‘WHO, just more assessment of the data that is out there and not over now,’ Adalja told CNN Thursday.
“The fact that it was an antiviral that showed benefits in some trials – but not in all trials – was enough to get people to want to use it because we didn’t have any tools, but I think it did. will probably be superseded shortly ”. Adalja said, adding that the indication for drugs may change over time.
A little background: WHO has brought together an international group of 24 experts and four Covid-19 survivors to review the data and make recommendations. The recommendation against remdesivir was based on data from four randomized trials including 7,333 people hospitalized with Covid-19.
“The panel concluded that most patients would not prefer intravenous treatment with remdesivir given the low-certainty evidence,” wrote researchers from various institutions around the world in the updated WHO guideline .
[ad_2]
Source link