Other Covid Drugs

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Anchor lead: Even with vaccines, the need for drugs to help treat Covid-19 continues, Elizabeth Tracey reports

Vaccinations against Covid-19 are underway nationwide, but the urgent need for treatments for Covid-19 still exists and will likely continue for months. Brian Garibaldi, a critical care medicine expert at Johns Hopkins, says the good news is there are some drugs in the pipeline to help.

Garibaldi: The hope would be that at some point we would have evidence that an oral antiviral agent would work. There’s a couple oral antiviral agents that have really good efficacy in test tubes against the virus, some animal studies suggesting they have benefit, but we just haven’t seen the results from human trials yet. That would be a game changer if we see that one of these oral therapies works then that would be amazing.  :21

Garibaldi says there is one in particular he’s excited about.

Garibaldi: It’s an oral pill, it’s EIDD2801. We’re expecting results from that sometime in the next couple of months. So hopefully it will come in time and have favorable results and we’ll be able to use it in the current outbreak.   :09

At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.