This was a trial of 4 drugs to treat ebola virus. Find patients with ebola, then give 1 of the 4 drugs, see what happens. We have to remember, however, that ebola is a deadly disease. Depending on the specific strain, mortality rates have varied from 25-90%. That's your baseline. 25-90% bleed out and die because of this virus.
Now, scroll down to Table 2 in that study. They present the mortality in the experimental groups, broken down by viral load: high and low, and an overall mortality. That's where this 53% is coming from. If you look at the MZapp group, you'll see a similar mortality rate. MZapp is a combination of 3 monoclonal antibodies, so it works totally differently than remdesivir. 51.3% mortality.
Now, if you go to the Safety subsection of the Results (or Table S7 of the Supplemental), it lists one serious adverse effect for remdesivir: a hypotension (loss of blood pressure) event. Ebola virus itself kills people by destroying the vascular system and causing people to bleed out. Doctors could not say that the remdesivir caused the hypotension and not the disease itself. We don't have much more data on safety and that's likely because the baseline disease is so nasty.
The dishonest lawyer is trying to claim that remdesivir was killing patients, but there's no evidence of that here. The statistic he uses shows only that remdesivir was not very effective in treating ebola virus. It was just as ineffective as a 3 monoclonal antibody cocktail, and there was no distinct safety signal in this study because of the nature of the ebola itself.
If you want to show remdesivir is unsafe for COVID, we need evidence from a trial where it's used in COVID.
It's a good thing to ask for details because the details matter. What this lawyer is doing is dishonest and it needs to be clarified.
He's referring to: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1910993
This was a trial of 4 drugs to treat ebola virus. Find patients with ebola, then give 1 of the 4 drugs, see what happens. We have to remember, however, that ebola is a deadly disease. Depending on the specific strain, mortality rates have varied from 25-90%. That's your baseline. 25-90% bleed out and die because of this virus.
Now, scroll down to Table 2 in that study. They present the mortality in the experimental groups, broken down by viral load: high and low, and an overall mortality. That's where this 53% is coming from. If you look at the MZapp group, you'll see a similar mortality rate. MZapp is a combination of 3 monoclonal antibodies, so it works totally differently than remdesivir. 51.3% mortality.
Now, if you go to the Safety subsection of the Results (or Table S7 of the Supplemental), it lists one serious adverse effect for remdesivir: a hypotension (loss of blood pressure) event. Ebola virus itself kills people by destroying the vascular system and causing people to bleed out. Doctors could not say that the remdesivir caused the hypotension and not the disease itself. We don't have much more data on safety and that's likely because the baseline disease is so nasty.
The dishonest lawyer is trying to claim that remdesivir was killing patients, but there's no evidence of that here. The statistic he uses shows only that remdesivir was not very effective in treating ebola virus. It was just as ineffective as a 3 monoclonal antibody cocktail, and there was no distinct safety signal in this study because of the nature of the ebola itself.
If you want to show remdesivir is unsafe for COVID, we need evidence from a trial where it's used in COVID.