No sooner had we told you about antiviral drugs with unproven efficacy, when information began to spread in the media that China had officially recognized Arbidol as a cure for coronavirus. This is reported by The Bell, citing a source. Earlier it became known that the Chinese government intends to test a number of drugs for the treatment of CoVID-2019. On February 18, the Chinese Ministry of Health included Arbidol in the sixth version of the preliminary CoVID-2019 coronavirus treatment plan, Xinhua News Agency reported. The previous version was valid from 5 February. It reported that the effectiveness of antiviral drugs against coronavirus has not been confirmed by clinical studies.
Desperate search for a cure for CoVID-2019
Despite the criticism of the drug, in Russia "Arbidol", which was developed in the USSR in the 1970s, is still in high demand and is even included in the list of vital essential drugs (VED). According to Vedomosti, revenue from sales of the drug for 2019 amounted to 2.5 billion rubles. Earlier, the manufacturers of Arbidol and Ingavirin launched an advertising campaign stating that these drugs are effective against coronavirus. At the same time, WHO experts, along with world experts, report that today CoVID-2019 is poorly understood and there is no cure for it. Moreover, Chinese authorities recently banned residents of Wuhan, the epicenter of the infectious disease outbreak, from leaving their homes. At the time of this writing, the official number of people infected with the new coronavirus is at least 76 thousand. More than two thousand infected people died.
In 2007, the patent for the manufacture of "Arbidol" ended, and today six large pharmaceutical companies in China are engaged in its production as a generic drug. For the first time, virologists from Zhejiang University announced that Arbidol can be used as a medicine against coronavirus. Later, they were supported by an expert from the PRC Ministry of Health. According to Chinese virologists, preliminary tests of "Arbidol" showed that the drug is capable of inhibiting the replication of coronavirus, slowing it down 60 times compared to the control group. However, no studies proving the effectiveness of the drug have been published.
"Abidol" or "Arbidol"?
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After the announcement of the Minister of Health of the People's Republic of China about the successful trials of "Arbidol" and the growing interest in this drug in China, the world and Russian media disagreed on which particular drug they were talking about - "Abidol" or "Arbidol".
The fact is that the CGTN TV channel followed by Reuters in their reports named the drug "Abidol". However, in publications of other editions it is directly about the drug "Arbidol", which is produced in China and Russia. Ultimately, the information that virologists are considering Arbidol as a cure for coronavirus was confirmed by the official Chinese media, including China Daily.
Thus, the PRC authorities can use the drug with unproven efficacy as a drug against the CoVID-2019 coronavirus. But why? It is possible that the Chinese Ministry of Health decided to take such a step to reassure the citizens of the Celestial Empire at least a little. An unprecedented quarantine, a ban on residents of some regions from leaving their homes, as well as visiting public places, can aggravate an already difficult situation. In this case, the use of "Arbidol" as a mass placebo may seem to the authorities a good decision. Of course, it is impossible to completely exclude the possibility that this drug is really effective against coronavirus. But such loud statements require indisputable proof.
Lyubov Sokovikova