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Kai Kupferschmidt Profile picture
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11 Feb, 4 tweets, 2 min read
Good news (again) from the UK’s impressive Recovery trial:

Tocilizumab reduced deaths from #COVID19 by about 4% and that was on top of dexamethasone.
It means that giving 25 people this drug on top of the standard of care will lead to one saved life.
Tocilizumab also reduced the need for a mechanical ventilator and shortened the hospital stay.

All of this is from press release for now: recoverytrial.net/news/tocilizum…
Manuscript is working its way through medrxiv right now.
Tocilizumab is an anti-inflammatory drug, an antibody that targets the IL-6 receptor, dampening the immune system. It is used to treat rheumatoid arthritis.

It is also about 100x as expensive as dexamethasone, so it will probably increase the global inequities of this pandemic.
Preprint is up here now: medrxiv.org/content/10.110…

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More from @kakape

Kai Kupferschmidt Profile picture
12 Feb
“I wish to confirm that all hypotheses remain open and require further analysis and studies”, says @DrTedros about origin of #covid19 at @WHO presser. Calls the origins mission "a very important scientific exercise in very difficult circumstances”.
@DrTedros @WHO "The expert team is working on a summary report which we hope will be published next week”, says @DrTedros.
“The full final report will be published in the coming weeks.”
@DrTedros @WHO “The number of reported cases of #COVID19 globally has declined for the 4th week in a row and the number of deaths also fell for the 2nd consecutive week” says @DrTedros. "This decline appears to be due to countries implementing public health measure more stringently."
Read 13 tweets
Kai Kupferschmidt Profile picture
9 Feb
Press conference on what @WHO-convened mission to investigate the origins of #SARSCoV2 found on their China trip is about to start in Wuhan.
(Was originally supposed to start an hour ago before being pushed back)
@WHO It finally started this minute.
@WHO After a lengthy introduction of the mission and its terms of reference, Liang Wannian, who leads the Chinese team of the joint mission, says he will now begin to talk about the key findings, starting with molecular epidemiology.
Read 29 tweets
Kai Kupferschmidt Profile picture
8 Feb
“It seems increasingly clear that manufacturers will have to adjust to the evolution of the virus, taking into account the latest variants for future shots, including boosters”, says @DrTedros at @WHO presser. “We have to be ready to adapt vaccines so they remain effective."
@DrTedros @WHO "These developments highlight why it's so important to scale up manufacturing and rollout vaccines as quickly as possible and as widely as possible to protect people before they're exposed to new variants”, says @drtedros.
@DrTedros @WHO “We need to do everything we can to reduce circulation of the virus with proven public health measures”, says @DrTedros. "Several countries are succeeding in suppressing transmission including those where new variants are circulating."
Read 30 tweets
Kai Kupferschmidt Profile picture
4 Feb
I‘m struck that it still hasn’t sunk in how much #b117 may change the course of this pandemic.

The initial shock about it being more transmissible seems to have worn off. But we are barely beginning to see its real-world impact.

A story: sciencemag.org/news/2021/02/d…
And a thread
After #b117 was identified in England and seemed to be taking off there, many people like me started looking at Denmark for clues.
Why Denmark? It sequences a lot! Here is a graph from @ECDC_EU from late December showing EU sequencing (look at B and note that it’s a log-scale):
@ECDC_EU Denmark has actually massively scaled-up its sequencing since then.
@MadsAlbertsen85 and his team, who have basically been doing all the sequencing for the whole country, are now getting close to 70% which is about as much as is possible (30% have low virus concentrations).
Read 15 tweets
Kai Kupferschmidt Profile picture
3 Feb
COVAX facility just published a forecast of what country will receive how much of what #covid19 vaccine in the first half of this year.
Lots of caveats of course. This is mostly AZ vaccine, which does not have emergency use listing yet, for instance.
gavi.org/sites/default/…
Big picture:
Countries can expect to receive vaccine to cover on average 3,3% of their population in first half of 2021, "enough to protect the most vulnerable groups such as health care workers”.
Here is “A” to give you an idea (SFP are self financing countries)
Most vaccine here is AstraZeneca’s:
240 million doses of AZ vaccine licensed to Serum Institute of India (SII)
96 million doses directly from AZ (this was supposed to be 153 million, but some shipments delayed to Q3)
Read 17 tweets
Kai Kupferschmidt Profile picture
2 Feb
Interim results from Russia’s #covid19 vaccine Sputnik V are out and looking good.

Vaccine efficacy was 91.6%

And once again an even stronger signal on moderate/severe cases:
20/4902 in placebo group
0/14964 in vaccine group
„The development of the Sputnik V vaccine has been criticised for unseemly haste, corner cutting, and an absence of transparency. But the outcome reported here is clear and the scientific principle of vaccination is demonstrated ...“
thelancet.com/journals/lance…
Authors end that comment in Lancet by pointing that the result „means another vaccine can now join the fight to reduce the incidence of #COVID19“.
Read 4 tweets

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