The UN health agency says the world’s largest randomised trial of COVID-19 treatments found “conclusive evidence” that remdesivir, a drug used to treat US President Donald Trump when he fell ill, has little or no effect on severe cases.
The World Health Organisation announced Friday the long-awaited results of its six-month “Solidarity Therapeutics Trial” that endeavored to see if existing drugs might have an effect on the coronavirus.
The study, which was not peer-reviewed, found that four treatments tested - remdesivir, hydroxychloroquine, lopinavir/ritonavir and interferon - had “ little or no effect” on whether or not patients died within about a month or whether hospitalised patients recovered.
Most of those had already been ruled out. But remdesivir, a repurposed malaria drug, has been classified as standard-of-care in the United States, and it has been approved for use against COVID-19 in the UK and EU.