Looking into possibly successful drug trials for Covid-19 and the media's role in reporting this: April 29, 2020

Now with the discussions from Dear Science in mind around the importance of a properly conducted drug trialing process, we speak to Russell Brown who is a journalist and the owner of Public Address. Over the weekend I saw an article posted by Russell in the Hard News section that asked whether Iran had found an effective treatment for Covid19. Conversations around vaccines seem to have been around since the global pandemic was first defined as such by the World Health Organisation, but those conversations have become more pronounced of late as we move into a phase of trying to return to some level of normalcy and as our knowledge of the virus grows. What we do know is that we know very little, but we can at least say with some confidence that social distancing measures of some sort will probably stick around until we have a vaccine. In fact, it is being reported that the Tokyo Olympics may not go ahead at all if a vaccine cannot be confirmed. A University of Otago infectious disease specialist Professor David Murdoch has said though that development of a COVID-19 vaccine is at best 12 to 18 months away. But, more than 100 vaccines are now in research and development with around six of these being used in clinical trials and many people are commending the speed in which the process has kicked off, a process that can normally take a very long time. As Newsroom reports it goes like this:

Phase one tests a very small number of healthy people, the key questions are: is it safe, is it producing antibodies? Phase two tests a bigger group. During this phase, the dosage is tweaked to see what the optimal dose should be. Again, antibodies are measured to get an idea of whether the vaccine is triggering the immune system. Phase three tests thousands of people representing a cross-section of a population. These people, split into a control group that gets a placebo and a group that gets the vaccine, are monitored for months to see if they catch the virus.

Now, back to Iran. Russell reports that:

Australian doctor James Freeman believes an effective treatment for Covid19 may have been found in trials in Iran: a daily oral dose combining sofosbuvir (which was developed by Gilead) and daclatasvir (which was developed by Bristol-Myers Squibb). The two have been previously combined as a treatment for hepatitis C – indeed, that’s pretty much the only way daclatasvir is used. The combination was easy to use in a trial in Iran because it’s manufactured there as a fixed-dose tablet called Sovodak.

Lillian didn’t know much about this so she reached out to Russell to explain further and started by asking him to recap this article a little bit.