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You’ve likely heard the news by now that the test of remdesivir was so successful in treating coronavirus patients that Dr. Anthony Fauci himself said they had to end it early because it wasn’t fair to the people getting the placebo.

While this seems like a breakthrough, Dr. Fauci was cautious about placing too much hope in remdesivir being the ultimate therapeutic cure. Tacoma MD Dr. Gordon Cohen joined Seattle’s Morning News to discuss.

“I want to be clear from the outset that this is not going to be the cure to coronavirus,” Cohen said. “What it is, is a proof of concept that coronavirus or the COVID-19 infection can be treated with a drug. So if we have a bacteria, we can create a poison because the bacteria is a living organism and we can kill that organism with a poison called an antibiotic.”

“But a virus isn’t really alive. We can’t just create a poison to go after a virus. So what we have to do is, we have to interfere with the viral replication process. And that’s what has made development of antiviral drugs so difficult and elusive,” he continued.

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Recent tests showed that remdesivir actually shortened the duration of recovery from 15 days to 11 days. Dr. Cohen said remdesivir is a good candidate because it was originally designed to be an antiviral drug.

“It shows that antiviral drugs can treat this particular virus. So now what’s going happen is this drug — which is currently not approved for any treatment for any disease anywhere in the world — is going to get emergency FDA approval this week so that it can start to be used on patients with coronavirus,” Cohen said.

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“Now the thing is, it’s not as simple as you could just show up in your doctor’s office and get it,” he said. “It’s an infusion, so you have to get an infusion for either five days or 10 days. What they found in their study is that if you got a 10-day course, you got better in 10 days. If you got a five day course, you got better in 11 days.”

What kind of side effects are there?

“The problem with remdesivir is that it did cause a lot of side effects,” Cohen said. “It’d be expected with a lot of drugs in that it causes nausea and vomiting, but one of the other problems was that it would also cause liver failure.”

“And this was one of the reasons that the trial for Ebola got stopped because people weren’t getting better and they were having side effects from the drugs.”

Listen to Seattle’s Morning News weekday mornings from 5 – 9 a.m. on ³ÉÈËXÕ¾ Radio, 97.3 FM. Subscribe to the podcast here.