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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 Wednesday September 29 2021, @02:01AM
The, quite obvious, point is patentability.
A new off-label use of a cheap generic won't make anybody a billionaire. India which already is making those generics by shitload, can get away with using them, but everywhere else have their own pharma companies that want to be fed $billions.