UN joins global push for virus remedies

The UN yesterday joined forces with world leaders and the private sector on an initiative to speed up development of COVID-19 vaccines and treatments, and ensure equal access for all.

"This is a landmark collaboration to accelerate the development, production and equitable distribution of vaccines, diagnostics, and therapeutics for COVID-19," World Health Organization chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told a virtual briefing.

"Our shared commitment is to ensure all people have access to all the tools to defeat COVID-19," he said.

The event was co-hosted by French President Emmanuel Macron, European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen and Melinda Gates of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

It included UN chief Antonio Guterres as a speaker, as well as global leaders like German Chancellor Angela Merkel and South African President Cyril Ramaphosa.

Conspicuously absent were leaders from China, where the novel coronavirus first surfaced late last year, and from the United States -- the country currently hardest-hit by the pandemic, with nearly 50,000 dead and close to 900,000 infected.

Worldwide, more than 190,000 people have died in the pandemic and more than 2.7 million have been infected.

"We face a global public enemy like no other," Guterres told the briefing. "A world free of COVID-19 requires the most massive public health effort in history."

He stressed the need to ensure that any diagnostic tests developed to detect the new virus, any drugs produced to treat it, and any vaccine made to prevent it should be provided to all of those in need.

"The world needs the development, production and equitable delivery of safe and effective COVID-19 vaccine, therapeutics and diagnostics," Guterres said.

"Not a vaccine or treatments for one country or one region or one-half of the world, but a vaccine and treatment that are affordable, safe, effective, easily-administered and universally available, for everyone, everywhere," he said.

"None of us is safe until all of us are safe.

"COVID-19 respects no borders. COVID-19 anywhere is a threat to people everywhere."

Earlier, Dr Maria Van Kerkhove, the technical lead for the World Health Organization's coronavirus response, told CNN that the world was "weeks to months" away from knowing what drugs will work to fight Covid-19.

Meanwhile, the experimental coronavirus treatment remdesivir has failed in its first randomized clinical trial, inadvertently released results showed Thursday, dampening expectations for the closely watched drug.

A draft summary went online briefly on the website of the WHO and was first reported by the Financial Times and Stat, which posted a screenshot.

But Gilead Sciences, the company behind the medicine, disputed how the now-deleted post had characterized the findings, saying the data showed a "potential benefit."

The summary said the Chinese trial involved 237 patients, with 158 on the drug and 79 in a control group. Remdesivir was stopped early in 18 patients because of side effects.

The authors said remdesivir was "not associated with a difference in time to clinical improvement" compared to the control.

After a month, 13.9 percent of the patients on remdesivir had died compared to 12.8 percent of those in the control group. The difference is not statistically significant.

The WHO told the Financial Times that the draft is undergoing peer review and was published early in error.

Remdesivir, which previously failed in trials against Ebola, belongs to a class of drugs that act on the virus directly -- as opposed to controlling the abnormal and often lethal autoimmune response it causes.

It mimics one of the four building blocks of RNA and DNA and gets absorbed into the virus's genome, which in turn stops the pathogen from replicating.

The antimalarial drugs hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine are also being widely used on COVID-19 on a so-called "compassionate basis" pending results from large trials, with early studies decidedly mixed.

Other therapies that are being studied include collecting antibodies from COVID-19 survivors and injecting them in patients, or harvesting antibodies from genetically-engineered mice that were deliberately infected.