The World Health Organisation has played down media reports of “breakthrough” drugs being discovered to treat people infected with the new coronavirus.
A Chinese TV report said researchers at Zhejiang University had found an effective drug for the virus, while Britain’s Sky News said researchers had made a “significant breakthrough” in developing a vaccine. Oil prices jumped on the reports.
The WHO spokesman Tarik Jasarevic said: “There is no known effective therapeutics against this 2019-nCoV (virus) and the WHO recommends enrolment into a randomised controlled trial to test efficacy and safety.”
The process of developing and testing drugs or vaccines against a new pathogen normally takes many years and is often fraught with pitfalls and failures.
Even at the accelerated pace enabled by new technologies, the earliest that scientists hope to be able to start initial human trials of a new coronavirus vaccine is by June this year.
Doctors looking for ways to treat patients infected with the new coronavirus are likely to try antiviral medicines licensed for use against other viral infections to see if they might help, as well as potential antiviral drugs still in development.
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