The Food and Drug Administration has given final approval to remdesivir as a treatment for COVID-19, making it the first and only fully-approved treatment in the U.S. for the novel coronavirus, CNBC reports. The drug has been permitted in cases of emergency use authorization since May, and was one of the medications used to treat President Trump when he was hospitalized earlier this month.
Remdesivir (sold under the brand name Veklury) is administered via an IV, and is intended for "the treatment of COVID-19 requiring hospitalization," the drugmaker, Gilead Sciences, said in a statement. While it is approved or authorized for temporary use in around 50 countries, a World Health Organization study earlier this month of some 2,750 patients found that remdesivir had "little or no effect" on death rates.
In a separate study by Gilead Sciences of 1,060 patients, the drug was found to prevent people from "getting sicker" and "from going onto more oxygen support," though the drugmaker likewise "did not find a statistically significant reduction in death rates across the entirety of patients treated in the trial," CNBC writes.
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