No “easy home runs”: Early Long COVID trials of Paxlovid and monoclonal antibodies failed, but the treatments still have potential Sick Times

  • Three prominent clinical trials targeting viral persistence in Long COVID with short treatment courses have not found that the drugs under study, Paxlovid and a monoclonal antibody, led to improved health for participants.
  • Viral persistence, the hypothesis that SARS-CoV-2 or pieces of it continually replicate in the body and lead to chronic symptoms, has been a challenge to study.
  • In an ideal scenario, a trial would specifically recruit participants with viral persistence markers and then measure changes in those markers. This hasn’t been feasible in the studies done so far.


That’s because they don’t have actual markers. Except for a very small proportion, viral persistence is just a very popular theory in the patient community and BioBS hype.
 
I feel a bit gaslit by this article. The researchers in the Long Covid space absolutely were saying that all patients had viral persistence and set these trials up in response. Not just these there were lots of trials setup across Europe as well on Paxlovid and a variety of other antivirals. Every single one of them failed. They didn't find that a sub group of patients improved despite their 35% of patients showed signs of viral persistence.

It was a guess and they threw many trials at the problem and ultimately found nothing useful. Even now a lot of people believe what needs to happen is another trial on a different monoclonal that targets Covid because this is the one that will finally do it because one or two patients recovered using it.

Its railroading the entire research process and wasting money. They need to focus on core pathology and find a real predictive biomarker that correlates with disease severity before they can make any practical progress, can't reliably do drug trials until you have an objective measure of the patients that we are fairly sure is measuring or proxy measuring the core pathology.

Whatever happened to Polybio's antibody tagging to find where the persistence infections are so they could be positively identified? All we really have is some pictures of T cell density in some rats infected with Covid and its driven this entire thing.
 
They need to focus on core pathology
They need to come to the realization that Long Covid patients with the exact same symptoms of MECFS, in fact, have MECFS or Covid triggered MECFS and at least read that meager literature before they do all their research. The word MECFS is not mentioned in this article.
 
The researchers in the Long Covid space
Further, I think the fact that there is a “long covid space” with their own set of researchers (e.g. Peluso) and own set of social media people/journalists is really problematic and counterproductive because it just reinvents the wheel.
 
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