The Ministry of Health has weighed in on the use of a new drug identified as Remdevisir which was adopted in the US for Covid-19 treatment on May 1, 2020.
According to a statement released by the Ministry of Health Director-General Patrick Amoth on Saturday, May 2, the government had observed that the drug had worked significantly well on patients in the US.
“This is a drug that was initially tried for the Ebola Virus treatment and the treatment of other coronaviruses like the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome and the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) whose outbreak was recorded in 2003 in Hong Kong,” he stated.
Amoth announced that the trial for the drugs was done in the US involving 1,063 cases, a matter that he approved of as a relevant testing base given the numbers involved.
According to his report, there was an improvement in terms of the use of supplemental oxygen for critically ill patients (breathing with ventilators) and the time of discharge for patients generally.
“During this study, 31 percent of the 1,063 people were able to go home within 11 days compared to the other arm who received normal treatment.
“Based on this, the Federal Drug Administration (FDA) has decided to register this medicine for the treatment of the pandemic, Amoth stated.
He, however, warned that this was not a cause to celebrate given that the medication was not that very different from the treatment currently being employed.
“If you look at the time frame, it is only 15 days for those who received normal treatment compared to 11 days for those who received Remdisivir.
“Therefore this is not a silver bullet, even though it has been approved but the other shortcoming of this medication is that it can only be given as an infusion through an injection and not as an oral formulation, and is also relatively expensive.
“For our cases, because most of them are mild and asymptomatic, it could be deployed but to a small fraction of our patients,” he stated, playing down the use of the medication in the country.
He added that as at now, the government was still actively pursuing other drugs from Japan and the US, including Hydrochloroquine which he explained, was now locally available.
“That is how the treatment landscape looks like right now. Still, there is no cure despite this encouraging news,” he stated.