In the race to to find a cure, scientists are rushing to release their study results. There are dangers in skipping the standard peer-review procedures, but they may be outweighed by the benefits.
When people go in for their flu shots, they donât normally know which company made the vaccine. But these days it is hard to find anyone who is not familiar with the brand name of their Covid-19 jabs. In fact, some individuals even have strong preferences about which one theyâd like to get.
For them, there is some good news and some bad news. The bad news is that they donât get to choose. The vaccination process is not so much an individual act as a collective strategy to protect the entire population â particularly its most vulnerable members.
One of the most desperate battles in the fight against the coronavirus is to find an effective treatment for patients who have contracted the virus and are at a high risk of serious illness or death from Covid-19. Up until now, the search for treatments has been disappointing. Only dexamethasone, a corticosteroid medication, has shown that it can reduce mortality in Covid-19 patients. But this medication does not actually fight the virus itself, but rather the uncontrolled inflammatory reaction it causes in patients with the worst prognosis.
On Monday an international team of researchers published the first verified scientific data on the effectiveness of a new treatment that could become the most potent antiviral drug against the coronavirus: plitidepsin. Scientists led by the Spanish virologist Adolfo GarcÃa-Sastre from Mount Sinai hospital in New York, explain that this drug is 100 times more potent than remdesivir, the first antiviral drug approved to treat Covid-19, which un