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Without wishing to puncture anybody’s optimism, Anjana Ahuja is quite right to argue in her column (Opinion, January 26) that vaccines are being oversold as a strategy to exit the pandemic.
It is unrealistic to believe that a virus mutating as rapidly as Covid-19 can be defeated through prevention alone.
Even once “herd immunity” is achieved, new variants are likely to circulate within the population. In addition to effective contact tracing, quarantine and isolation, the key to unlocking the population is to find effective treatments that prevent people from becoming seriously ill.
The US government’s Operation Warp Speed is accelerating development of promising treatments including inhaled interferon beta — a naturally occurring protein investigated at my own university, the University of Southampton.
This treatment can prevent the progression of any virus-induced lung damage once someone is infected in contrast to preventing infection (which vaccines do).
It is time for other governments, including the UK’s, to emulate this approach by placing as much national priority behind development of treatments as has successfully been deployed behind distribution of vaccines.
Sir Stephen T Holgate
Medical Research Council Clinical Professor of Immunopharmacology
Faculty of Medicine, Clinical and Experimental Sciences
University of Southampton
Southampton, UK
https://www.marketwatch.com/articles/vir-will-test-its-covid-19-antibody-with-eli-lillys-sending-shares-up-again-51611760089?mod=mw_quote_news
The MC of this large biotech company has risen around $10bn in the past 5 weeks, due to Covid treatment news. It shows what could happen with Synairgen
If Synairgen are hoping to get some funding from Operation Warp Speed it is better to say production of tens of thousands pr month rather than saying hundreds of thousand. He's nae dafty this Marsden chappy.
https://www.ft.com/content/17c44c96-39f2-4ada-badd-d65815b0a521#myft:my-news:page
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2035002
So Germany buys 200,000 doses while the Phase 3 trial results are not yet reported (see last line of text). Wow.
https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20210115-miracle-drug-ivermectin-unproven-against-covid-scientists-warn
Aye that'll be right
https://www.medpagetoday.com/infectiousdisease/covid19/90411
Not only a crap paper, but also a crap drug
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(21)00076-3/fulltext
You can find it BBC 1 news at 1pm in the 24th minute. On iplayer.
I don't recall hydroxichloroquine having a successful phase 2 double blind clinical trial that was peer reviewed. I do recall Trump putting the FDA under pressure to approve it and remdesivir. Both useless.
https://investors.vir.bio/news-releases/news-release-details/vir-biotechnology-and-gsk-announce-nhs-supported-agile-study
These area couple of other treatments under trial. According to this article the drug VIR 7831 is already in a global phase 3 trial. Posted here for information.
Great Video Mac. Well found.
For those that don't want to listen to the whole 38 minutes, I recommend you just read page 8 of the transcript which is shown beneath the video. Here is an extract from page 8:
'Finally — and this is really difficult, like an Apollo project— we need to have stockpiled in our freezers broad-acting antivirals and potentially vaccines that can recognize a whole span of coronaviruses or influenza viruses. I'm not into prediction, but I think it's pretty obvious that there is a set of viruses that are particularly jumpy and that are likely to emerge in the future.'