A small remde­sivir study with lots of short­com­ings sug­gests it may be work­ing against Covid-19 — and 1 an­a­lyst fore­casts mid-May roll­out

In a small study in­volv­ing 53 com­pas­sion­ate use cas­es of se­vere­ly af­flict­ed Covid-19 pa­tients, Gilead found en­cour­ag­ing ev­i­dence that sug­gests remde­sivir might be pro­vid­ing a ben­e­fit — but it all has to be borne out in on­go­ing Phase III stud­ies.

Re­port­ing in the New Eng­land Jour­nal of Med­i­cine, re­searchers con­clud­ed that the drug re­sult­ed in the clin­i­cal im­prove­ment of 68% of these pa­tients, Gilead re­ports, but the caveats are ex­treme­ly im­por­tant. The study was small, da­ta may be miss­ing, and there was no ran­dom­ized con­trol group to com­pare against.

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