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1. remdesivir is not a cure for COVID and not as valuable to the rest of the world. We need vaccine 2. there is plenty of generic remdesivir in India
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How do you imagine millions of people will die again? I plan to disagree, but first I need to know what the hell you're trying to say.
In the case of Remdesivir, which is hard to make, imagine you're the CEO of Gilead and the government of a country tells you they need it, people are dying without it, they're going to mass produce it at scale, and you're going to tell them how to retool their factories to produce it, since it'll take extra months of trial and error if you don't, during which people are dying and the disease is spreading exponentiall…
The great argument I wanted to make is that if there is a finite supply of a drug, only enough for 20% of the sick, selecting which 20% gets it doesn't cause more people to die. It might select who dies in deplorable or admirable ways, but the death count is the same.
But you're making a different and better argument.
I agree that your scenario would be terrible. But I don't think it describes what Gilead is doing. According to posts here, they're allowing generic manufacturing in poor countries, and India doesn't even respect drug patents to begin with.
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> Because this seems like an okay solution to make back investments The investment was made by the American people paying taxes. The profits will be privatized. https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/05/26/remdesivi...
Pandemic aside, the US government shouldn’t get a better deal than any other investor. If you invest “tens of millions” into drugs that will cost “billions” to bring to market, you don’t get to get the drug for free. Imagine a Silicon Valley investor proposing those terms: we’ll invest $1 million in your startup for 75% of the equity. But that’s exactly what people are proposing when they say a few tens of millions o…
Truly good/fair solution probably exists between nationalizing Gilead and Gileads opening bid.
The drug that looked very promising for the last pandemic, yet turned out to have no benefit, and now looks very promising as a treatment for this pandemic... Smells to me like someone in the remdesivir marketing department is doing very well... Are there any scientific studies that don't have vested interests and show it's a good treatment?
Sounds like the Guardian isn't happy its home country got out-bid. Did it expect that America would buy less of a potentially life-saving drug, effectively prioritizing the welfare of foreigners over her own? I'd expect any government to act in such a manner.
But, would our reaction be still the same if Guardian's headline said China or Russia did this? Probably not. Perhaps we would even talk about putting new sanctions.
I think the right move would be allowing other companies to produce enough of it. If that means financially supporting Gilead, let's do that. Then nobody has to take all the stockpile.
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Countries can nationalize the patent in times of pandemics and produce it locally. But this drug is hard to make.
This, I work in specialty pharmacies and Remdesivir is a complicated drug to produce. Currently Gilead believe they can bring down their production time from 8-12 months 6-8 months, that means we won't see a large supply of this drug until 2021.
https://www.statnews.com/2020/05/14/gilead-should-ditch-remd...
>The company has also developed GS-441524, another pro-drug that, as its name suggests, the body also converts into GS-441524 triphosphate, but in just in three steps. GS-441524 is easier to synthesize than remdesivir, requiring three steps instead of the seven needed for remdesivir.
>Researchers initially thought that remdesivir would be activated more quickly than GS-441524 in human cells infected with the SARS and MERS coronaviruses. Yet data from primary human airway epithelial cells — one of the most clinically relevant cell-based models of the human lung — showed no statistically significant difference in potency between the two compounds. When GS-441524 was used to treat cats with feline infectious peritonitis, a progressive and usually fatal disease caused by a coronavirus, it displayed remarkable safety and therapeutic efficacy, with 96% of cats recovering after treatment.
>Recent research in coronavirus-infected nonhuman primates demonstrated problems with remdesivir that inadvertently showed the antiviral effectiveness of GS-441524. In multiple studies testing remdesivir in coronavirus-infected mice or rhesus macaques, it was rapidly converted to GS-441524 in the bloodstream.
>Take the latest controlled study conducted in rhesus macaques infected with SARS-CoV-2: After remdesivir was administered intravenously, GS-441524 was present in serum samples at concentrations 1,000-fold greater than remdesivir. Upon completion of the study, the researchers found that only GS-441524 — not remdesivir — was detected in the macaques’ lungs, yet they exhibited no signs of respiratory disease, significantly reduced viral loads, and a distinct reduction in damage to lung tissue. Such results reinforce those obtained from a prior study, also in macaques, and data from other species that GS-441524 exhibits strong antiviral activity.
>The first step in the bioactivation of GS-441524 is the rate-limiting step, something that remdesivir was designed to avoid. But that doesn’t matter clinically because of remdesivir’s rapid transformation to GS-441524 in the bloodstream.
There is also a black market for GS-441524, which could be a reason Gilead doesnt want to promote it?
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2020/05/remdesiv...
The drug that looked very promising for the last pandemic, yet turned out to have no benefit, and now looks very promising as a treatment for this pandemic... Smells to me like someone in the remdesivir marketing department is doing very well... Are there any scientific studies that don't have vested interests and show it's a good treatment?
Covid-19 doesn't kill you. Those most sick in their 2nd and 3rd weeks are usually made very sick by their immune system's own inflammatory immune response (cytokine storm).
What this means is that Remdesivir could be very effective for patients that have known exposures and are in high risk categories.
...but, for most clinicians, since it needs to be given intravenously, it's not usually part of the clinical response (for the moment).
This is why the manufacturer (Gilead) is working on an oral delivery system. ...and we should all be supportive of that, because a broad use anti-viral might be very useful for covid-19 as well as other future viral diseases.
Still - what's going to save us from covid-19 is going to be a vaccine (and some degree of herd immunity).
The drug that looked very promising for the last pandemic, yet turned out to have no benefit, and now looks very promising as a treatment for this pandemic... Smells to me like someone in the remdesivir marketing department is doing very well... Are there any scientific studies that don't have vested interests and show it's a good treatment?
This smells an awful lot like the Tamiflu story. Rumsfeld was chairman of Gilead until he was nominated as Secretary of Defense. He refused to sell his shares in the company and thus was forced to leave the room whenever discussions that might impact the company happened. A few years later the Pentagon starts stockpiling billions of dollars worth of Tamiflu. By the time Rumsfeld left the white house, Gilead shares we…
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The last studies I saw showed Remdesivir didn't actually save lives. Unless some very different studies have come out, this is just a politically connected pharma company using the pandemic to get a fat check from the US government. This is just your standard every day corruption.
One of my friends is an anaesthetist dealing with Covid patients day in day out in India. She works for a Government hospital and they started trying Remdesivir 3 days ago. She said all three patients that they have given the drug to have died of arrest - she does insist though that its not because of the drug but she was saying that it isn't improving things if the patient is in late stages of Covid.
Remdesivir has a minor beneficial impact when delivered VERY EARLY.
No need to spread FUD when there's clinical data available.