MONDAY, Oct. 19, 2020 (HealthDay News) — The antiviral drug remdesivir doesn’t reduce COVID-19<\/a> patients’ risk of death, a new study says.<\/p>\n The World Health Organization-sponsored study of the drug — the only antiviral authorized for treatment of COVID-19<\/a> in the United States –included more than 11,000 people in 30 countries, The New York Times<\/i> reported.<\/p>\n The findings were posted online on Thursday, but have not yet been peer-reviewed or published in a scientific journal.<\/p>\n “This puts the issue to rest — there is certainly no mortality benefit,” Dr. Ilan Schwartz, an infectious-disease physician at the University of Alberta in Canada, told The Times<\/i>.<\/p>\n However, another infectious-disease expert expressed caution about the findings.<\/p>\n A large trial like this that’s conducted in numerous countries with different health care systems can result in inconsistent treatment protocols whose effects can be difficult to analyze, Dr. Peter Chin-Hong, University of California, San Francisco, told The Times<\/i>.<\/p>\n “So much goes into care,” he said. “The drug is only part of it.”<\/p>\n Remdesivir’s maker, Gilead, challenged the study’s findings. The company said more rigorous studies had found a benefit, The Times<\/i> reported.<\/p>\n Remdesivir was granted emergency authorization by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in May after a U.S. National Institutes of Health study concluded that the drug modestly reduced the time to recovery in severely ill COVID-19<\/a> patients.<\/p>\n But that study didn’t find that remdesivir prevented deaths in COVID-19<\/a> patients. A final analysis published Oct. 8 in the New England Journal of Medicine<\/i> suggested “a trend toward reduced mortality” in certain COVID-19<\/a> patients who received remdesivir, according to Gilead.<\/p>\n ![\"MedicalNews\"](\"https:\/\/images.medicinenet.com\/images\/HealthDay\/healthday.png\")
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