A common and readily available drug to prevent or treat COVID may have been under our noses all along.
www.medscape.com
I'm not here today to tell you that the antidote has been found — no, it takes large randomized trials to figure that out. But I do want to tell you about a
paper that, unlike so many that came before, lays out the argument for a potential COVID preventive so thoroughly and so rigorously, that it has convinced me that this little drug, ursodeoxycholic acid (UDCA) — you may know it as Actigall, used for an uncommon form of liver disease — may actually be useful to prevent COVID infection.
How do you make a case that an existing drug — UDCA, in this case — might be useful to prevent or treat COVID? In contrast to prior basic-science studies, like the
original ivermectin study, which essentially took a bunch of cells and virus in a tube filled with varying concentrations of the antiparasitic agent, the authors of
this paper appearing in
Nature give us multiple, complementary lines of evidence. Let me walk you through it.
...
Does this study show that taking Actigall will prevent COVID? Of course not. It doesn't show that it will treat COVID either. But I bring it up because the rigor of this study stands in contrast to those that generated huge enthusiasm earlier in the pandemic only to let us down in randomized trials. If there has been a drug out there this whole time which will prevent or treat COVID, this is how we'll find it. The next step? Test it in a randomized trial.
