Dr. Anthony Fauci’s favored drug to treat COVID-19 is remdesivir. It’s the first and only antiviral drug approved to treat COVID. But did you know it’s actually an HIV drug that’s been studied in clinical trials for years before switching to being marketed as a “broad-based antiviral to work on any number of RNA viruses?”
That’s right. Remdesivir is a virtual copy of Gilead’s HIV drug GS-7340/Tenofovir with a few slight changes. It’s also a nucleoside/nucleotide reverse transcriptase inhibitor in the HIV retroviral drug class under Gilead’s GS-5734, which was tested in monkeys as an Ebola treatment, but was found effective against severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) in animal models.
In early 2020, Gilead began testing it for SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19 in humans. The reverse transcriptase in it is “an enzyme in the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and many retroviruses that convert the RNA template to DNA,” according to research published in Molecule.
In April Fauci said “the remdesivir trial is reminiscent of research conducted 34 years ago when he and others were looking at the human immunodeficiency virus.”
SOURCES:
FDA October 22, 2020
Nature March 2, 2016
Molecules May 2020
Google Docs
Mountain View Voice May 4, 2020