Why haven't more repurposed drugs been pressed into service against Covid?
Late last December, Ontario Province approved fluvoxamine for early treatment of COVID-19. Dr. Norman Doidge, a genuine polymath, tells the fascinating story of how an antidepressant was enlisted versus Covid in the January 22 Globe and Mail, in a long article with a long title — “Vaccines are a tool, not a silver bullet. If we’d allowed more scientific debate, we would have realized this earlier.”
Fluvoxamine is most commonly used to treat obsessive-compulsive disorder. The first clue that it might work as a “repurposed” drug came when health workers at a large mental hospital in Paris began contracting Covid at three times the rate of the mentally ill patients, even though the latter had far more risk factors. French psychiatrists began looking at records of over 7,000 patients in Paris mental hospitals, and found that those treated with serotonin inhibiting (SSRI) antidepressants were less likely to require intubation or die.
Meanwhile, Dr. Angela Reierson, a St. Louis child psychiatrist, confined to her home with Covid, recalled a study showing that fluvoxamine, an SSRI inhibitor, halted sepsis in mice. (Severe Covid resembles sepsis.) She contacted Dr. Eric Lenze, a colleague at Washington University Medical School who specializes in repurposed drugs, and he carried out the first randomized control experiment with Covid patients. Not one person treated with fluvoxamine deteriorated or suffered lung damage, whereas 8 percent of the placebo group did.
A larger Brazilian trial of 1,500 unvaccinated patients with Covid and one other high risk condition followed. Those given fluvoxamine were 66 percent less likely to require hospitalization compared to the control group, and 90 percent less likely to die.
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