Dr. Fauci says data shows ‘quite good news’

White House health advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci said Wednesday that data from a coronavirus drug trial testing Gilead Sciences’ antiviral drug remdesivir showed “quite good news.”

Speaking to reporters from the White House, Fauci said he was told data from the trial showed a “clear cut positive effect in diminishing time to recover.”

“This will be the standard of care,” Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, added.

U.S. health officials are expected to release the full results of a drug trial conducted by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases later Wednesday. Gilead Sciences announced earlier in the day that the study had met its primary endpoint, but did not provide further details.

Gilead also released preliminary results from its own study, showing at least 50{3c4481f38fc19dde56b7b1f4329b509c88239ba5565146922180ec5012de023f} of the patients treated with a five-day dosage of remdesivir improved. The clinical trial involved 397 patients with severe cases of Covid-19. The severe study is “single-arm,” meaning it did not evaluate the drug against a control group of patients who didn’t receive the drug.

There are no proven treatments for Covid-19, which has infected more than 3.1 million people worldwide and killed at least 217,569 as of Wednesday, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University. U.S. health officials say producing a vaccine to prevent the disease will take at least 12 to 18 months, making finding an effective drug treatment soon even more crucial.

President Donald Trump has touted Gilead’s remdesivir as a potential treatment for the virus. There a number of ongoing studies testing the drug to see if it’s effective in stopping the coronavirus from replicating, but it is not yet a proven treatment. 

On Tuesday, Fauci warned that the United States “could be in for a bad fall” if researchers don’t find an effective treatment to fight the coronavirus by then.

Covid-19 is “not going to disappear from the planet,” he said, adding infectious disease experts are learning about how the virus behaves by watching emerging outbreaks in other regions such as southern Africa that are starting to enter their colder seasons.

This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.