GPO ups production of five drugs needed to fight Covid-19

[webfact]

GPO ups production of five drugs needed to fight Covid-19

By The Nation

 

File photo

 

The Government Pharmaceutical Organisation (GPO) has increased production of five drugs used treat Covid-19 to make sure that it will be sufficient for all patients.

 

The official at GPO said that excluding favipiravir, Thailand has five drugs that are used to treat Covid-19, totalling 39.6 million tablets: there are 1.8 million tablets of chloroquine, a drug used to treat malaria; 30.6 million tablets of the antiretroviral drug containing lopinavir and ritonavir; 1.9 million tablets of darunavir antiretroviral drug; 1.9 million tablets of ritonavir antiretroviral drug and 3.4 million tablets of Azithromycin, an antibiotic used to treat bacterial infections.

 

The official added that GPO had accelerated the purchase of two Covid-19 antiviral drugs -- favipiravir and hydroxychloroquine.

 

“We ordered favipiravir from Japan and China of which 187,000 tablets have been procured, while another 103,860 tablets will be delivered by April this year,” the official added.

 

“Meanwhile, we have already ordered 1.09 million tablets of hydroxychloroquine from domestic manufacturers.”

 

Source: https://www.nationthailand.com/news/30386610

 

-- © Copyright The Nation Thailand 2020-04-23

 

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[keith101]

7 minutes ago, webfact said:

there are 1.8 million tablets of chloroquine,

They say that this drug is doing more harm than good so maybe they should remove this one .

[edwardandtubs]

Knowing Thai doctors they'll probably recommend taking all 5 drugs together.

[Bruce Aussie Chiang Mai]

57 minutes ago, keith101 said:

They say that this drug is doing more harm than good so maybe they should remove this one .

Help you arthritis and kill your liver, but you can go lay with the mossies.

????❤????????

[Credo]

12 hours ago, keith101 said:

They say that this drug is doing more harm than good so maybe they should remove this one .

None of the anti-viral medications has been particularly effective, so the idea that there is a 'magic bullet' isn't happening anytime soon.   What drugs they use to treat someone depends on a variety of factors, including pre-existing conditions.   

 

[smiggley]

I have read Favipiravir is working well to relieve symptoms and even cure patients. With upwards of 77% recovery rate Thailand must be doing something right.

[Caldera]

None of these drugs - none - have been proven to be effective against the novel coronavirus so far.

[Arkady]

I haven't seen any evidence from clinical trials that confirms any of these drugs work. Doctors in the US say that in most cases where off label drugs have been used for compassionate reasons, i.e. the patient is expected not to survive, by definition they are administered too late to provide any benefit. If any of the drugs are to help, they would need to be adminstered very early on to prevent repliation of the virus, rather than after it has replicated in the lungs so much that it has caused irreperable damage. In Thailand, since they are mainly only testing people who are very sick, this must also be the case. This seems to be just going through the motions to appear to be doing something.

[JDGRUEN]

French Virologist Dr. Didier Raoul has  use Hydroxychloroquine on 80 Covid-19 patients - 78 were cured. With significant findings that after a 5 day average the patients could be moved to regular ward to convalesce with family. 

Dr. Raoul discovered the effectiveness of the drug compilation that suppressed the Corona Virus released the findings of his latest much more comprehensive results to the effectiveness of the drug combination hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin.

STUNNING POSITIVE RESULTS

Here is a copy of the 2nd study done by French foctors showing the overwhelming success of hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin. 
 
 
We need an effective treatment to cure COVID-19 patients and to decrease the virus carriage duration. In 80 in-patients receiving a combination of hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin we noted a clinical improvement in all but one 86 year-old patient who died, and one 74 year- old patient still in intensive care unit. A rapid fall of nasopharyngeal viral load tested by qPCR was noted, with 83% negative at Day7, and 93% at Day8. Virus cultures from patient respiratory samples were negative in 97.5% patients at Day5. This allowed patients to rapidly de discharge from highly contagious wards with a mean length of stay of five days. We believe other teams should urgently evaluate this cost-effective therapeutic strategy, to both avoid the spread of the disease and treat patients as soon as possible before severe respiratory irreversible complications take hold.

Given the urgent therapeutic need to manage this disease with effective and safe drugs and given the negligible cost of both hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin, we believe that other teams should urgently evaluate this therapeutic strategy both to avoid the spread of the disease and to treat patients before severe irreversible respiratory complications take hold.

[JDGRUEN]

The statements that Hydroxychloroquine does no good to help Covid-19 patients and actually hurts them is based on a very flawed retrospective study of Veterans Affairs hospitals in the USA. This study was never peer reviewed, had no consistency in patient handling, had no controls of any kind - nor even any consistency in drug dosage or length of drug administration. Plus the veterans were all quite old - all had serious pre-existing conditions (heart, lung, diabetes, kidney problems, etc., etc. The medications did not include Zinc - a viral part of the Cocktail dosage of Hydroxychloroquine, Azithromycin, and Zinc. 

°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°

In contrast... 

 

A TALE OF TWO DIFFERENT MEDICAL APPROACHES

 

Washington (Kirkland) nursing home: No hydroxychloroquine, 35 deaths out of 120 residents

 

Texas nursing home: Treatment WITH hydroxychloroquine, 1 death out of 135 residents

H/t: 
JamesTodaroMD

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And in general the reason this drug trio has not been double blind tested is because in the middle of an Epidemic it is highly unethical (and illegal) to deny a control group of Covid-19 disease patients any type of a curative drug and be given an inert placebo to act as a control group.