Yet another potential Covid treatment has fallen by the wayside. This time it's fluvoxamine, an antidepressant, which showed some promise in minimizing serious disease in small trials. But in a large, randomized trial, it flopped completely. The lesson? You need an antiviral drug to treat a viral infection – not a repurposed drug. These have all failed.
repurposed drugs
With a little over a year from the beginning of the pandemic, the shape of what was tried is becoming clearer. When everyone is dying, and nothing you can do makes a difference, you pull out all the stops, and you throw everything you have at the problem. What does it mean, medically, to throw everything you have at the problem? With 2 million deaths attributed to COVID-19 and 85 million confirmed cases, there is certainly enough “clinical material” to begin to see what does and does not work to improve outcomes.
More than six months after the hype of repurposed COVID drugs, we have nothing. But this wasn't at all unexpected. Here's why.
It's now more than seven months into the pandemic in the U.S. and doctors and scientists have been trying pretty much everything -- with little to show for their efforts. Perhaps the most effort has gone into finding drugs to prevent the immune system meltdown caused by the virus. Here's another: Can a simple, safe, approved drug called phenylbutyric acid tread the line between under- and over-treatment of the immune system by reducing cell stress?