Where are we after 1 year of Pandemic?
Anti -Covid vaccines are securing our long term but we should also complement with ancillary treatments?
Where do we stand after 1 year of Pandemic?
- Mr R. 79 years old, with kidney transplant is still waiting for his 1st Covid vaccine
- Mr B. 65 years old, with asthma contracted Covid and was asked after telemedicine diagnostic to stay home and take aspirin, resulting in a high probability to develop a severe version of Covid and go to hospital.
- My dad died of Covid in April 2020 during 1st lock down in France. 1year later, I am again not allowed to visit my mother.
Population is locked down by fear of hospital saturation and early stage diseases are treated simply with aspirin, hoping that the patient will not develop a severe version.
Most of Western countries are basing their anti-covid plan on the sole vaccine approach — Don’t get me wrong, I am not against vaccine. It is impressive how the pharmaceutical industry has developed new treatments with super-high efficiency (for several) in such a short time — But the current mainstream strategy based on vaccine could present some weaknesses:
- It takes time to produce vaccine shots for entire populations. Few countries have progressed very quickly. Other are lagging in comparison to population expectations. other are very far from collective immunity.
- Populations in some countries may not be vaccined before long, which means that the virus will circulate widely in those countries, generating new variants of the virus.
- There is a non negligible probability that those variants will fail the current vaccines. (press already indicates South African variant could resist to AstraZeneca one)
OK, labs promise that they will update their vaccine. But guess who is going to have those new shots? Probably the same people that had an early shot from V1 vaccines, delaying once more the date for shipping to emerging countries.
What I have understood from all the experts that inform us is that fighting a pandemic is a race against the virus. but if the main weapon defined by our strategy is too slow to deploy, shall we stick to this only weapon ?
Is there an effort to develop complementary treatements?
What is striking to me is that so little communication is done on the research for medical cure of early stage of the disease.
Yet, those ones could prove very useful in this fight against this pandemic if it could limit the evolution to severe cases and reduce the viral charge thus reducing contamination risks.
Or shall I say, there has been some communication on Remdesivir 1 year ago, but this molecule resulted in a fiasco (high costs — 3000€ per patient — for no results at all) and there are polemics on very cheap molecules but with no details in the mainstream media on what has been tested and what are the programmatic results.
I am not a physician so I am not able to (and don’ intend to) declare if chloroquin or Invermectin are efficient and should be used. But what I know is that…
