Category: The Best Healthcare in the World

Joe Biden’s speech was really good

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

Via the New York Times:

“WASHINGTON — Former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. on Thursday laced into President Trump, condemning him for saying he ordered a slowdown of coronavirus testing and comparing the sitting president to a whiny child.

“He admitted telling people, and I quote, ‘You have to slow the testing down, slow it down please,’” said Mr. Biden, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee. “He thinks that finding out that more Americans are sick will make him look bad. That’s what he’s worried about, he’s worried about looking bad.”

Mr. Biden’s speech, delivered at a gymnasium in Lancaster, Pa., was designed to focus attention on his call to expand protections under the Affordable Care Act. Mr. Biden warned that insurance companies, if freed from the federal mandate to cover pre-existing conditions, could deny people coverage if they had suffered from the coronavirus. And he called the Trump administration’s legal efforts to overturn the 2010 health care law “cruel.”

“If Donald Trump has his way, complications from Covid-19 could become a new pre-existing condition,” Mr. Biden said.

Early peek at data on Gilead coronavirus drug suggests patients are responding to treatment

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

(Editor’s note: Far be it from me to think they leaked this to bump the stock, but it does seem promising.)

Via STAT:

A Chicago hospital treating severe Covid-19 patients with Gilead Sciences’ antiviral medicine remdesivir in a closely watched clinical trial is seeing rapid recoveries in fever and respiratory symptoms, with nearly all patients discharged in less than a week, STAT has learned.

Remdesivir was one of the first medicines identified as having the potential to impact SARS-CoV-2, the novel coronavirus that causes Covid-19, in lab tests. The entire world has been waiting for results from Gilead’s clinical trials, and positive results would likely lead to fast approvals by the Food and Drug Administration and other regulatory agencies. If safe and effective, it could become the first approved treatment against the disease.

The University of Chicago Medicine recruited 125 people with Covid-19 into Gilead’s two Phase 3 clinical trials. Of those people, 113 had severe disease. All the patients have been treated with daily infusions of remdesivir.

“The best news is that most of our patients have already been discharged, which is great. We’ve only had two patients perish,” said Kathleen Mullane, the University of Chicago infectious disease specialist overseeing the remdesivir studies for the hospital.