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from the you-can-lead-a-horse-to-water dept.
A pill to treat Covid-19: 'We're talking about a return to, maybe, normal life'
Within a day of testing positive for covid-19 in June, Miranda Kelly was sick enough to be scared. At 44, with diabetes and high blood pressure, Kelly, a certified nursing assistant, was having trouble breathing, symptoms serious enough to send her to the emergency room.
[....] But the Kellys, who live in Seattle, had agreed just after their diagnoses to join a clinical trial at the nearby Fred Hutch cancer research center that's part of an international effort to test an antiviral treatment that could halt covid early in its course.
By the next day, the couple were taking four pills, twice a day. Though they weren't told whether they had received an active medication or placebo, within a week, they said, their symptoms were better. Within two weeks, they had recovered.
"I don't know if we got the treatment, but I kind of feel like we did," Miranda Kelly said. "To have all these underlying conditions, I felt like the recovery was very quick."
[....] At least three promising antivirals for covid are being tested in clinical trials, with results expected as soon as late fall or winter, said Carl Dieffenbach, director of the Division of AIDS at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who is overseeing antiviral development.
"I think that we will have answers as to what these pills are capable of within the next several months," Dieffenbach said.
An effective treatment would be great for those who get covid despite the availability of, or even having received, vaccinations.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 28 2021, @10:58AM (7 children)
Isn't the recovery time more or less two weeks any way (10 days quarentine if I remember correctly)? So, it doesn't even need to be placebo effect, just normal recovery.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by choose another one on Tuesday September 28 2021, @11:49AM (4 children)
Bingo. _Most_ patients recover in that timescale anyway (although the quarantine period is based on when you typically cease to be infectious, which is not same as "recovered").
Significant fraction usually have some ongoing symptoms ("long covid"). Smaller fraction end up in hospital with typically longer recovery times, if they recover at all.
Until the trial finishes we won't really know - kind of the point.
More interesting is that the trial subjects are effectively a self-selected group - the unvaccinated. So here we have, according to TFA, a certified nursing assistant with diabetes and high blood pressure. Way to go girl - at least cinically vulnerable if not extremely clinically vulnerable (in UK terms) yet not prepared to get the approved non-experimental vaccine, but prepared to risk unapproved antivirals and maybe getting placebo. Death wish for yourself and those in your care too. Notably TFA didn't mention any minimum brain cells requirement for participation in the trial...
(Score: 4, Touché) by c0lo on Tuesday September 28 2021, @01:14PM
That's only needed in the second phase trial, when they study safety and side-effects. It is when they'll try to discover how many brain cells the pill kills.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 28 2021, @11:38PM
patients in these kinds of trials often get pay and free medical care. Although they might have breached an NDA by talking to the press... hard to tell if the corp would care to enforce the NDA when they're getting good press from it though
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Username on Wednesday September 29 2021, @07:51AM (1 child)
How do you know she was unvaccinated? The vaccines for covid do not prevent infection or transmission. It prevents whatever symptom that results in death. IE: Joe Rogan was vaccinated.
(Score: 2) by choose another one on Wednesday September 29 2021, @08:41AM
Quite right they don't - I actually know almost as many people now who've had covid after vaccination (and/or after previous infection) as had it before the vaccines.
And I know that most of those people seem to recover faster than the unvaccinated, hence I actually looked in TFA to see if it they had simply been vaccinated... and I found it specified:
[referring to the trial] : "Participants must be unvaccinated"
RTFA.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 29 2021, @01:10AM (1 child)
Are they red pills or blue pills?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 29 2021, @01:46AM
...and the ones that mother gives you don't do anything at all.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WANNqr-vcx0 [youtube.com]