If Trump and Co. doesn’t hoard this medication, it has the potential to save millions of lives. Please note: this is not a “cure” but a possible treatment.
The short story: a couple of decades ago, Fujifilm’s subsidiary Toyama Chemical developed an anti-influenza drug called “Avigan,” which was used primarily for the Japanese flu.
In 2014 the generic version of Avigan, Favipiravir, was deployed in West Africa during an ebola outbreak:
When administered to patients with low to moderate viral loads, Favipiravir cut Ebola’s mortality rate in half, from 30 percent to 15 percent.
(Wired): In early 2020, the Chinese government administered Favipiravir to a select group of Coronavirus patients. The results were so promising that on March 28—last Saturday—Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe told reporters that his government had begun the formal process for designating Avigan as Japan’s standard treatment for Covid-19.
On March 17, [2020] when Zhang Xinmin, an official at China’s ministry of science and technology, said that Favipiravir, the generic version of Avigan, had proved to be effective in treating Covid-19 patients at hospitals in Wuhan and Shenzhen.
It was, Zhang said, “very safe and clearly effective” for treating Covid-19 patients. And while the data and methodology behind Zhang's claims have not been made public, he did announce some of the conclusions doctors had drawn from them: At a hospital in Shenzhen, Zhang claimed Covid-19 patients treated with Favipiravir tested negative for the virus after a median of four days, rather than the 11 days it took for members of the study’s control group to test negative; in another study carried out in Wuhan, patients taking the drug allegedly recovered from fever nearly two days earlier than those who did not take the medication.
Such results, preliminary and unconfirmed as they are, would seem to conform with the way Favipiravir works. Unlike most other influenza treatments, which inhibit the spread of the virus across cells by blocking the enzyme neuraminidase, Favipiravir works by inhibiting the replication of viral genes within infected cells, thereby mitigating the virus’s ability to spread from one cell to another.
What this means, in practical terms, is that patients who take the drug while their viral load is low or moderate may prevent it from making them any sicker.
Japan is DONATING the medication to other countries:
Prime Minister Abe seems to be among the believers, and last weekend announced that Japan will “start to boost production and proceed with clinical research in cooperation with those countries that wish to join us.” He also said that many countries had already expressed an interest in the drug.
Though Abe did not mention any of those countries by name, one of them seems to be the United States. According to a recent report in Politico, Fujifilm has discussed with the FDA and the US Department of Health and Human Services the possibility of Avigan trials in the US, and it is seeking research funding from the US government. After Abe spoke to President Trump by phone about Avigan, the report says, the White House National Security Council began pressuring the government to accept a donation of Avigan from Japan, and asking the FDA to authorize its use on an emergency basis.
China is also shipping the generic form of the medication (Favipiravir) to other countries, and Japan is shipping Avigan as well:
By late March, once trials had concluded, China had begun exporting Favipiravir. In Turkey, health minister Fahrettin Koca said a shipment of the “special drug” from China was being used to treat Covid-19 patients in 40 different cities.
Japan, too, seems to have recognized Avigan’s utility as a tool of soft power. Three days after Zhang announced that the drug had been effective in clinical trials in China, Indonesian President Joko Widodo told reporters he’d imported 5,000 doses of Avigan, and that he was “in the process of ordering two million more.”
Has the Trump administration imported either Avigan or Favipiravir to the United States for emergency trials? Japan has offered to DONATE the medication to the US, and the White House National Council has urged the FDA to accept the offer, as noted above. It appears it might be safer than chloroquine, but “health officials” have rejected it in the past. The difference is that Avigan and its generic counterpart Favipiravir have been used in trials already for Coronavirus, and the results have been promising—not so much for chloroquine, which has not shown any evidence it fights Coronavirus.
Health officials have repeatedly rejected Avigan in the United States, despite years of advocacy from Japan and Fujifilm. South Korea officials this month also declined to use the drug in that nation's coronavirus response, warning of insufficient evidence and the risk of "serious side effects."
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“There is no definitive evidence that [chloroquine] works” to fight coronavirus, infectious-disease specialist Anthony Fauci told CNN on Tuesday.
Trump also has publicly discussed his efforts to lean on FDA and its commissioner, Stephen Hahn, in order to speed approvals amid the coronavirus outbreak.
(The Guardian): Japanese flu drug 'clearly effective' in treating coronavirus, says China
Medical authorities in China have said a drug used in Japan to treat new strains of influenza appeared to be effective in coronavirus patients, Japanese media said on Wednesday.
Zhang Xinmin, an official at China’s science and technology ministry, said favipiravir, developed by a subsidiary of Fujifilm, had produced encouraging outcomes in clinical trials in Wuhan and Shenzhen involving 340 patients.
“It has a high degree of safety and is clearly effective in treatment,” Zhang told reporters on Tuesday.
Patients who were given the medicine in Shenzhen turned negative for the virus after a median of four days after becoming positive, compared with a median of 11 days for those who were not treated with the drug, public broadcaster NHK said.
In addition, X-rays confirmed improvements in lung condition in about 91% of the patients who were treated with favipiravir, compared to 62% or those without the drug.