Another old drug is being tried vs. Covid-19, and it might actually Help
Tom Avril, The Philadelphia Inquirer - 1/20/2022
In the first few weeks of the pandemic, when physicians were grappling with the unknown like everyone else, psychiatrist Angela Reiersen recalled that an old drug in her field, called fluvoxamine, affected the body in ways that went beyond improving mental health.
In addition to easing symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder and depression, the drug also reduced inflammation, which was emerging as a key culprit in severe cases of COVID-19.
Yet fluvoxamine, a 40-year-old drug that costs a fraction of the pricey new treatments for COVID, now looks as if it will actually help.
A larger, follow-up study in Brazil, patients who took the drug were less likely to need emergency care and hospitalization, compared with those who were given a placebo.
And in Canada, a group of scientists advising the province of Ontario recently gave fluvoxamine a conditional thumbs-up.
A cheap drug <----(Well we can't have those!)
That’s the case with fluvoxamine, which costs just $4 wholesale for a 10-day treatment of COVID, said Lenze, a professor of psychiatry at the St. Louis medical school. (In contrast, you have to shell out about $530 for a course of Paxlovid and $700 for molnupiravir, the new antiviral pills from Pfizer and Merck. And another type of COVID treatment, called monoclonal antibodies, costs more than $2,000.)
But the low cost of fluvoxamine comes with a catch. Because the patent expired on the original formulation of the drug long ago,there is little profit in it. No drug companies would throw their muscle behind such an effort, Lenze said. <---WHOOP! THERE IT IS!
“The very thing that makes it so ideal for repurposing — it’s a generic, it’s widely available, it’s cheap — is also what’s in our way,” he said.
Pretty sad to see that even though something Can and Does save lives, they (big pharma) deem it "unprofitable", and as such, they completely disregard it, or claim that it "doesn't help" or "doesn't have enough evidence" so as to pave the way for their "new drug" that costs upwards of 175 times more! WOO HOO......BONUSES FOR THE BIG SHOTS!!! BIG PROFITS!!!
And here I thought it was all about "saving lives"..........well now we can conclude that it's All About Them Benjamins!
What sick and twisted fuckin' scum they are!
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