jhu72 wrote: ↑Fri Mar 20, 2020 8:27 am
Bart wrote: ↑Fri Mar 20, 2020 7:28 am
jhu72 wrote: ↑Fri Mar 20, 2020 1:06 am
Am watching the tail end of Maddow now. Dr. David Ho is being interviewed. He is the Chinese - American super virologist mentioned in an article earlier today by Trinity I think. In any case he was talking about the possibilities for the drug combo that had everyone spun up today. He is much less sanguine about its possibilities to battle corona virus than were us educated non-specialists. He did not call it promising. He has been in contact with the researchers who made the discovery.
It is vastly different than his approach to torch viral proteases. He may very well be correct but it still needs to be fleshed out.
Did Dr Ho have any insight into Remdesivir? Its action is also completely different than inhibiting proteases.
edit-original was snippy sounding...not intent.
My statement was perhaps misleading. He felt overall we would solve the problem. He was not worried about that, long term. He was certain we would solve the problem (no time estimate given as I recall).
He was specifically less sanguine about the reported malaria drug talked about yesterday. He seemed more upbeat about Remdesivir and other approaches. He also had just had a drug trial fail, where his group had tested a solution that was similar conceptually (to my understanding, not identical) to the malaria drug approach. The mixture of a cocktail of already well known drugs. Don't recall the details, which ones. This perhaps contributes to his skepticism. Of course the malaria drug approach should be tested further. He did not suggest otherwise (nor would I).
Since Dr. Ho is such an important scientist, I went back and re-watched his segment on the Rachel Maddow show last night and took notes. This is what he said (duplicates some of the above).
First, he commented on the article from Wednesday in the New England journal of medicine which reported that the trial on Lopinavir-Ritonavir (currently approved to treat HIV/AIDS) was not successful. He said that result was not surprising to him.
Second, he said the prospects for developing therapeutics in the long term are good. Since we need immediate help, however, he said the idea of repurposing already approved drugs is the appropriate approach because it will shorten the time to market. But, he said, we would need to be very lucky to find such a drug that would successfully work against COVID-19. He said the most successful drug will likely be a newly discovered drug which will take 1 to 2 years. I should emphasize that he is talking about a therapeutic, not a vaccine. He did not discuss vaccines at all last night.
Third, with respect to the malaria drug Chloroquine, he said that based on statements from Chinese doctors and scientists, they found it to be helpful in shortening the course of the disease by a little bit. But there was no evidence the drug would make a huge difference in survival. He did not comment on the 20 person French study. He did not comment on whether we should continue to run tests on this drug, although he said nothing to suggest that that would be a waste of time.
Fourth, with respect to Remdesivir, which is currently not approved, he says the drug has been shown to have “activity” (not sure what that means, but I think it is positive) against SARS and MERS, which are highly related to COVID19. He said there are two large clinical trials currently underway in mainland China. We will have read outs in the near future. If successful, he said, the drug could be scaled up reasonably quickly. He did not give a specific time frame.
How many of your life long republican buddies have you shared this love affair with? Have you forgiven FDR for his imprisonment of Japanese/Americans. FDR was a deeply flawed POTUS. He was super secretive leader who never even told Truman about the Manhattan project. I suppose those warm and fuzzy fireside chats just melted your little ole republican heart. 
