In a tweet April 26, 2021, U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson asks why it took so long — more than a year — for the NIH and Dr. Anthony Fauci to study early treatments of existing drugs for COVID. While they waited, over 570,000 lives were lost to COVID, the senator says.
What the NIH is proposing now is to look at existing prescription and over-the-counter medications to see if they can fight COVID-19 symptoms when administered early on in the disease. The studies will be “large, randomized, placebo-controlled” trials, the NIH says on its website. The list of drugs they’ll be looking at during the $155 million project is yet to be disclosed.
While Johnson doesn’t mention it in his tweet, the fact is it’s possible the emergency use authorization (EUA) for the currently available COVID vaccines may not have been valid, had effective treatments for the virus been acknowledged as available. According to the FDA, it can only authorize unapproved vaccines in emergency situations if “there are no adequate, approved, and available alternatives.”
SOURCES:
Twitter Sen. Ron Johnson April 26, 2021
NIH April 19, 2021
FDA EUA Explained November 20, 2020