BREAKING NEWS! Study Confirms That Lopinavir–Ritonavir Ineffective In Treating Covid-19
Source: Covid-19 Treatments And Drugs News Mar 20, 2020 4 years, 9 months, 3 days, 10 hours, 1 minute ago
Covid-19 Treatment And Drugs: A new study lead by one of China’s to respiratory specialists, Dr Cao Bin, Professor at Department of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine, China-Japan Friendship Hospital has shown that Lopinavir–Ritonavir is ineffective in treating Covid-19.
The research was published in the New England Journal Of Medicine yesterday.
(
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2001282)
The research involved 199 patients in Wuhan who had severe cases of laboratory-confirmed Covid-19 for a randomized, controlled trial.
Of those, 99 received Lopinavir–Ritonavir while 100 were only given standard care.
The HIV antiviral that works by stopping viruses from replicating had no observable effect on viral shedding in Covid-19 patients, suggesting it does not fight the virus that causes the condition. Two-fifths of patients in the Lopinavir–Ritonavir group continued to test positive for the virus at the end of the trial.
Those treated with the drug were also more likely to experience side effects like nausea, vomiting and diarrhea, which were so severe in 13 patients that they had to stop treatment.
Lopinavir–Ritonavir is a HIV drug from Abbvie Pharmaceuticals that goes by the trade name Kaletra or Aluvia.
In the early stages of the Covid-19 breakout in Wuhan, certain Chinese doctors were using it along with alpha-interferon to treat the disease but they were not much success. Even assumptions that the antiviral resistance to the drug was considered at those stages when in reality it had no efficacy.
Experts at those stages felt that as Lopinavir/ritonavir was already an approved HIV drug, it would have been easier to repurpose it for Covid-19.
Many governments had stockpiled the drug and also Chinese businessmen had even bought the drug at inflated prices from generic suppliers in India at prices that were inflated by as much as 30 times!
Dr Tony Cunningham, an expert in antiviral drugs and HIV treatment at a hospital in Sydney that is treating coronavirus patients, described its use as a “move of desperation.”
He said, “The protease of HIV and the proteases of (the Covid-19 virus) are very different in structure and sequence, so it’s not surprising that this did not work.”
Also it must be noted that many HIV antiviral drugs are highly toxic and can cause a lot of adverse effects and chronic medical problems with long term usage.
It is interesting that Thailand’s MOPH and doctors From Rajvithi Hospital, Dr Kriangsak Atipornwanich, an ‘expert physician’, and Assoc Prof Dr Subsai Kongsangdao, ‘a specialist’ had held a press conference to say that they had developed a successful treatment protocol using these same drugs and the articles were featured in many non-credible local and international media.
The team that developed the treatment protocol had used Lopinavir/ritonavir and the flu drug oseltamivir, which were both generic
ally made by the local GPO. According to unconfirmed sources, the GPO had also made a lot of money through orders from various hospitals and also other countries that were trying to stockpile on these drugs after the news broke out.
We tried contacting officials and doctors from Rajvithi for comments but to no avail.
We at Thailand Medical News would like to warn the public that in this trying times to be careful of Fake news and misinformation disseminated by government officials and agencies and also local media and so called ‘medical experts' around the world.
We will be covering in a next few days, new revelations about two more drug candidates at the moment, faviparavir and remdesivir which are also not as promising as claimed due to certain limitations.
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