Some Expensive Ugly Sister Drugs Approved First
The snooty Eurocrats at WHO organizations say it’s no good. In contrast, the nice Eurocrats at the European CDC think it’s OK, as do many other organizations.
But we’re not here to bury remdesivir, but to explain how it works.
Vaccine prevents covid viruses from entering your cells. Once the virus is inside, remdesivir can shorten your illness and may save your life.
Remdesivir is absorbed into your cells.
If a SARS-CoV-2 virus turns up in the cell, it connects to a ribosome. Ribosomes make the proteins we are made of.
The virus mRNA tells the ribosome to make copies of the covid messenger RNA until the cell explodes and spills all that messenger RNA out into your body.
No wonder covid makes people so sick.
Remdesivir attaches to the ribosome and tells it to cut off the copy of the viral RNA before it is finished. This short mRNA doesn’t work, so nothing happens and you get better faster. You might want to watch this entertaining Kahn Academy Course on how mRNA and ribosomes work together. Be sure to contribute.
Timing is All
It is important to give the remdesivir early, usually just as you first get short of breath.
Later, after all the viruses are gone, your immune system may overreact and attack your own cells even though they aren’t infected.
Then steroids like dexamethasone can be life-saving. They decrease the immune response. You only take them for a few days until the molecules that signal danger fade away.
Friends of the blog at Harvard’s Houghton Library reveal Emily Dickinson was a great baker as well as a great poet. You make get the recipe for her 20-pound fruitcake here. Enjoy.
There is a hot new treatment for covid in phas two and three testing as we speak. We’ll take a look at the good, the bad, and the ugly on Wednesday.
