New Drug Study – Lackluster Results , 3063

G¬ood evening, I’m still reporting on new medications that don’t seem to work.
According to a pivotal study published as a Friday evening drop in the most prestigious medical journal in the world, the New England Journal of Medicine, the highly touted “miracle drug” remdesivir which was predicted to sell at about $4,500 per dose for the treatment of a certain much-talked-about virus, has fallen flat on its face.
You know it’s bad news in Washington and New York when the big news is dropped at 6pm on Friday – known as the Friday drop. Why? The big reporters are all headed out of town for the weekend, and the news lineups for the 6pm network news slots are already written and in some cases filmed.
This friday drop filtered over to ZeroHedge at 8:45 last night, and to my desk by 10:30.
The new drug only showed a partial benefit over a placebo in one particular group – those patients receiving oxygen.
This was the gold-standard study – a randomized, placebo-controlled trial of intravenous remdesivir in adults hospitalized with the virus and evidence of lower respiratory tract involvement.
“Patients were randomly assigned to receive either remdesivir (200 mg loading dose on day 1, followed by 100 mg daily for up to 9 additional days) or placebo for up to 10 days. The primary outcome was the time to recovery, defined by either discharge from the hospital or hospitalization for infection-control purposes only [or death].”
There were a total of 1063 patients in the trial – 538 took remdesivir, and 521 took a placebo.
Overall, remdesivir cut recovery time from 15 days on average in the placebo group, to 11 days for remdesivir. Well, at least that’s something.
Serious adverse events occurred in 21% of the remdesivir group and 27% of the placebo group. That’s not good.
The Conclusions section called Remdesivir “superior to placebo in shortening time to recovery in adults hospitalized with [the virus] and evidence of lower respiratory tract infection.”
As a veteran medical reporter, the use of the word “superior” seems unjustified by these findings, however, it will be interesting to see what the TV physicians have to say about this – if anything – over the next few days because – I AM NOT A DOCTOR!
Here is the efficacy graph for this one category of patient where the new drug performed significantly better than placebo.
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As you can see that by day 24 of a 28-day treatment regimen, the improvement by patients on placebo stopped and the new drug continued to help these patients a little bit.
Does this strike you as superior? Preliminary studies of legacy drugs seem to be getting people out of the hospital in days, not weeks. And now we may never know because the negative PR of the MSM has rendered such studies impossible in the U.S. because patients are said to refuse to participate.
However there were 4 other categories tested as well. In the group of patients receiving mechanical ventilation – the most gravely ill - those on placebo did better than those on remdesivir.
Moving down the severity scale, in patients receiving high-flow oxygen or non-invasive mechanical ventilation, remdesivir beat out placebo only by a narrow margin.
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The one place where remdesivir scored significantly better than placebo was in patients who were hospitalized but just barely were sick enough to need some supplemental oxygen.
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In graph B, we see patients who did not need supplemental oxygen, but did need hospitalization.
Here remdesivir barely beat out placebo.
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And finally, this is the overall graph of all patients. Again, remdesivir helped these patients a little bit, but it was not judged statistically significant.
I will include the link to this study in the Description box below.
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2007764

I’m still reporting from just outside the citadel of American freedom. Good day.