The world on the verge of defeating COVID-19
Sopuruchi Onwuka
Like many viral pandemics before it, global scientific coalition is winning the war against the dreaded novel coronavirus disease popularly called covid-19.
Our survey of innovations against the virus which spurs inflammatory spikes in the key organs of the body shows that the global pharmaceutical sciences appear to have surmounted the key challenge in both prevention and cure of the disease.
The COVID-19 which spread from China in 2019 and covered the world within months has infected 255,341,858 people across the globe and killed 5,134,109, according to Worldometer.
Some 230,787,703 patients have also recovered from the disease as medical scientists battled the pandemic with variegated responses. The recoveries form 98 percent of the 235,921,812 closed COVID-19 cases, indicating that only some 2.0 percent of the global infection cases ended in death.
However, out of the 19,420,046 current cases, 19,341,373 or 99.6 cases are reported to be in mild conditions while 78,673 cases or 0.4 percent of currently infected patients are described to be in serious or critical conditions.
As at November 17, global concerted campaigns have deployed about 7,558,708,455 vaccines against the virus, according to Binge COVID-19 Tracker.
The vaccines along with novel medical remedies currently deployed at hospitals across the world have drastically reduced the fatal impact of the disease, allowing the global supply chain reconnection to activate economies which were shut down in 2020 in vain effort to arrest the pandemic.
From Europe to Asia, Russia, Middle East and Africa; the global vaccine deployment has consistently reduced hospitalization and death associated with the virus, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). Whereas infection and hospitalization have continued with variants of the virus and recurrent waves of infection, rate of death has continued to fall.
As the vaccines help the world to buy time against the pandemic, medical remedies are increasingly underway, driven by commercial opportunity as pharmaceutical firms compete for market supremacy and lucre.
From Hydroxychloroquine which was the initial response to the disease in 2020, therapies have consistently improved from existing antiviral medicines to new formulae evolved from persistent studies of the characteristics and composition of the virus.
Since early 2021, the race for clinical remedies for severe cases of COVID-19 placed the Israeli Gilead Sciences which produced currently reigning Remdesivir in the lead.
The U.S. government approved Remdesivir, and authorized three antibody therapies that help the immune system fight the virus. Both the approved and authorized therapies are given through infusions at clinics.
However, the wave of global COVID-19 cases and limited availability of the medicine raised cost and supply gap issues, making it difficult for effective treatment of COVID-19 to reach the global poor which are concentrated in third world countries where the rate of vaccination is also very low. The huge market gap has remained a great incentive for competing players in the global pharmaceutical industry.
Thus, while attention had focused on the lineup of vaccine candidates under development, parallel endeavors had persisted on curative remedies for those already down with the disease.
A US firm, Merck, is currently seeking government’s authorization for emergency use of its antiviral medicine to reach more people in the United States and across the world. The authorization by the US government would clearly lead to wider global acceptance for the medicine which is boasted to cut the risk of hospitalization and death from COVID-19 by 50 percent.
Merck and its partner, Ridgeback Biotherapeutics, said early results showed patients who received the drug, called molnupiravir, within five days of COVID-19 symptoms had about half the rate of hospitalization and deaths.
The 50 percent efficacy is lower than monoclonal antibodies, the intravenous cocktail used to treat high-risk people with mild or moderate COVID-19.
The Merck pills are designed to be taken at first signs of symptoms when the coronavirus is replicating rapidly and the victim’s immune system has not yet mounted a defense.
Studies show that the monoclonal antibodies reduce hospitalizations and deaths by up to 85 percent among patients, but Merck says that its antiviral remedy would not require medical experts to administer intravenous infusions as in the case of prevailing options. And experts agree that Merck’s pills which are taken at home would have bigger overall impact on COVID-19 because they can reach more people.
The pills are effective and relatively cheap, but, like Remdesivir, they are unlikely to be available for everyone with COVID-19; still leaving a wide supply gap in the large population of global COVID-19 patients.
Fortunately, more companies are in the queue with separate COVID-19 drugs also awaiting authorization by the US government.
Pfizer is developing a similar pill, and is also advancing convincing trial results to necessitate early emergency authorization. The company on November 15 asked regulators to authorize its experimental pill for home treatment COVID-19 amid new infections in the United States.
Pfizer’s drug is part of a decades-old family of antiviral drugs known as protease inhibitors, which revolutionized the treatment of HIV and hepatitis C. The drugs block a key enzyme which viruses need to multiply in the human body. The Pfizer’s pill is different than the Merck pill, which causes tiny mutations in the coronavirus until the point that it can’t reproduce itself.
Pfizer reported earlier this month that its pill cut hospitalizations and deaths by 89% among high-risk adults who had early symptoms of COVID-19. The company studied its pill in people who were unvaccinated and faced the worst risks from the virus due to age or health problems, such as obesity.
Pfizer said its pill can significantly cut the rate of hospitalizations and deaths among people with coronavirus infections. The company demands that the drug be made available for adults who have mild-to-moderate COVID-19 infections and are at risk of becoming seriously ill.
The Chief Executive Officer, Albert Bourla, stated: “We are moving as quickly as possible in our effort to get this potential treatment into the hands of patients, and we look forward to working with the U.S. FDA on its review of our application.”
Both Merck and Pfizer have signed a deal with U.N.-backed group to allow generic drugmakers to produce low-cost versions of their pills for certain countries.
Merck’s COVID-19 pill was authorized in Britain earlier in the month. The U.S. government has also already committed to purchasing millions of doses of Merck’s and Pfizer’s pills.
Other drug makers including Atea Pharmaceuticals and Roche are also in the line with new drugs for home treatment of COVID-19 although the stage of their clinical trials means that they would trail behind the frontrunners in the game.
The Oracle Today reports that the global pharmaceutical industry is advancing strong weapons at a period cold weather exacerbates resurgence of COVID-19 waves in Europe, Russia, Asia and Middle East. And governments hope to combat the new waves of infection with enhanced vaccine deployment and emerging clinical therapies.
In Europe where countries are under pressure from new COVID-19 waves, the number of new cases and fatalities has made it urgent to adapt every available remedy to protect citizens from the highly infectious pathogens.
In the United States, the Biden administration plans to sink billions in boosting vaccine production by one billion doses per year and offer makers of the mRNA vaccines assistance to expand infrastructure and capacity.
In China, government is holding cities down for total vaccination in a bid to stamp out the virus in the country, entailing billions of vaccine doses administered constantly to vulnerable subjects.
In all, governments of the world are relying on the advances in medical sciences to deal with health, social and economic issues associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. And the pharmaceutical industry which is receiving unprecedented government funding grants under the coordinated battle against COVID-19 is relentless with research and innovations that have helped push back the disease and provided the confidence to open up economies around the globe.
The Transportation Security Administration of the United States stated November 17 that it expected air passengers and crew members visiting the United States to surge to pre-COVID level of 26 million passengers around the 11 days of Thanksgiving, up from zero in 2020 when lockdown was in place.
Coping with the passenger surge under the prevailing pandemic situation amplifies how far medical and health sciences have led the world through the global scale of most troubling and horrific plague in modern times.
