The race to develop a COVID-19 vaccine is well underway, but given its extended timeline—12 to 18 months—the search for an existing drug to treat the virus is almost equally pressing. For many on the right, including the president, the method of choice was hydroxychloroquine, a malaria drug initially thought to combat the infection. But with a damning study out showing the drug is basically ineffective, and in fact may lead to increased death rates, even Fox News has quietly dispensed with that theory.
In New Haven, meanwhile, Dr. Joseph Vinetz, an infectious disease doctor at Yale School of Medicine, is seeking to launch a clinical study of the drug camostat mesylate, a generic medication approved in Japan to treat chronic pancreatitis that he hopes can be approved and marketed to treat COVID-19. If the trial succeeds, he said, this could be ”a total game changer.” But the process is proving fraught. Within hours of registering his trial on a National Institutes of Health website on April 20, he received an email from a large U.S. pharmaceutical company. “They are trying to take my project and engulf it for their proprietary [financial] gain,” Vinetz told me. “I take that email as a threat.”
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