{Global Health}: There is no benefit from the drugs used in...

Since the first days of the outbreak of the “Covid-19” pandemic, and in the face of the complete lack of information about the “Corona” virus, doctors around the world have sought to treat people with drugs designed for other diseases, hoping that they will help cure the epidemic that is still puzzling scientists in Many aspects of its effect on the body.

As scientific opinions vary about the effectiveness of these drugs in dealing with the virus, the largest study conducted so far on the four main medicines among them came to indicate that none of them helps to save the lives of the infected, as reported Thursday evening by the World Health Organization.

The international organization had developed a test program under the title “Solidarity”, to determine the effectiveness of the drugs most widely used in the world to treat HIV infections, namely: chloroquine and hydroxychlorquine, which have been used for years to treat malaria, the antiviral remdesivir, and the two anti-retrovirals lopinavir and retronavir, which are used to treat AIDS, in addition to Anti-inflammatory interferon. This study, which lasted for months, and in which dozens of specialists participated, proved that none of these drugs helped reduce the death rate among patients after 28 days of treatment.

The Health Organization stated that the Solidarity program is a unique test, in terms of its comprehensiveness or the speed with which it was carried out, as it included 11,200 patients in more than 400 hospitals in 32 countries around the world. The patients were randomly assigned to be treated with either the usual means alone, or in combination with one of these drugs.

One of the experts who supervised this program says that none of these tested drugs reduced the death rate in any of the disease groups, and had no significant effects on the respiratory difficulties that result from the virus or on the period of treatment in the hospital, which has been believed since Months that remdesivir reduces it by four or five days. This unequivocal and surprising result strikes another wedge in the coffin of treatments that have long been described by many, especially some political leaders, as constituting a revolution and turning point in the fight against the epidemic, as it confirms that there is no therapeutic benefit from it, and may even lead to negative effects in some cases.

It is reported that the World Health Organization had decided last June to stop the use of chlorquine and hydroxychlorquine in these experiments due to doubts about the possibility of increasing the mortality rate, but it returned and allowed it after it was found that these doubts were the fruit of a false study, to return a month later to that. It was withdrawn based on tests conducted by WHO’s experts and now confirm that it has no therapeutic benefit.

The health community does not hide its concern about the results of this study regarding the remdesivir drug produced by the American company “Gilead” and is used to treat the Ebola virus, and it wonders about its fate after the United States and the European Medicines Agency had given the green light to use it temporarily in the treatment until reliable information about its effectiveness appears. .

While the WHO study confirms that remdesivir is ineffective in treating “Covid-19” infections, the prestigious medical journal “NEJM” published in its latest issue, which was published last week, a study stating that this drug helps those who take it to recover five days before the one who does not Eating it. That study was conducted on 1062 patients, and it showed that the drug helped reduce the death rate among a limited group of patients, who are those who are at the beginning of the stage of obtaining oxygen and who have not yet reached the critical stage and do not need a respirator. Gilead has reported that it is running new tests to see if remdesivir, along with the drug paricitinib, which is used to treat arthritis, increases the positive effects on sufferers.

Communicable disease specialist Jose Ramon Arribas, who participated in the Solidarity program, says: “This is bad news for doctors who are fighting against (Covid-19). We hope that the study carried out by the World Health Organization will be subject to review by independent experts to be published in scientific journals after peer comparison. It is likely that the European Medicines Agency will withdraw these drugs from the treatment guide within days.

“This is further evidence of the difficulty in developing an effective drug and establishing proof of its effectiveness,” adds Aribas. The inconsistency that appears sometimes from the studies is due to the design of these studies. Remdesivir has shown efficacy in tube and laboratory experiments and in animals, and even in humans in initial stages, but the study conducted by the World Health Organization is more extensive and includes a detailed analysis of all the tests conducted so far.