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Comment by Consultant32452 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

I have no idea if remdesivir works or not, but that is the problem with drugs in a shortage scenario like we're currently seeing. If there aren't enough of them, you're going to save them for the most critical patients. But those patients are the most likely to die anyway. That's why randomized controlled trials are so important. Data from a hospital that's not randomizing distribution of the drug is not really helpful.

This is a worthless 2nd hand hearsay anecdote.

Remdesivir has a minor beneficial impact when delivered VERY EARLY.

No need to spread FUD when there's clinical data available.

>Remdesivir has a minor beneficial impact when delivered VERY EARLY.

There's still a couple of problems though:

* It has to be delivered by IV drip

* It's in short supply

* It's expensive

Which means that realistically, the only way to get a positive impact from it would be to send high-risk patients who were very likely to have just been exposed to the hospital for the injection. Even then, the risk-value proposition does not seem that great.

None of these three points is the bottleneck. It's still easy to give someone an IV early on if they're in a high-risk group, it's not in that short supply, and at ~$2500 per treatment regimen it's not that expensive compared to an extended hospital stay.

The bottleneck is that it's only slightly effective.

It’ll be a means for the rich to lessen their pain. Nothing more. Let’s be honest.

No hospital would take you in on slight symptoms. The drug alone costs $3,000+, it’s basically US-only and thus needs to be administered there, which will end up costing about as much again.

See the top 0.01% hold some remdesivir in their mansions for their private physician to administer.

Can you point me to the results from the clinical trial?

I wasn't trying to spread FUD. I did state that the arrests weren't because of the drug.

Yes a minor impact, that doesn't really show that it saves lives at all. Just that generally those who take the drug early on are out of bed a couple of days earlier than others. Not really worth 2000USD a pop. Sounds like a big pharma scam to me. Same with the Chloroquin

Same here. I swear Covid has been bringing out the WORST in information recycling I've ever seen.

They use some medical mumbo jumbo to show that patients spend less time at hospitals compared to other drugs and therefore Remdesivir works. They know how to lobby the scientific community so we will never know the truth. Sick patients will use and pay out of fear. I would love to see an unbiased study at some point if at all that shows the relative efficacy of Hydroxychloroquine with and without zinc and Remdesivir and other drugs.

The Tamiflu hustle.

Remdesivir can change the disease so people are in the hospital for a less days. Accounting for only the basic cost of a hospital bed at least financially this is a big improvement. And of course if one of the major problems is a shortage of beds this helps a lot.

It seems to reduce the number of days spent in the hospital, which would save lives if hospitals are over-capacity. But only if given early.

So in theory it could save lives if it keeps Karen and Becky out of the ER.

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