Fluvoxamine is both inexpensive and highly effective at preventing mild COVID-19 from turning severe.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02988-4
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/langlo/article/PIIS2214-109X(21)00448-4/fulltext
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Are we turning the corner on Covid-19 treatments?
Covid-19 treatments are key to living with the virus. Here’s where we’re at.
Fighting Covid-19 with a pill
One pill that’s been shown to be effective against the disease wasn’t even made to fight Covid-19.
Fluvoxamine is a cheap, generic antidepressant that’s been around since the 1990s. It also appears to reduce hospitalizations and deaths by Covid-19 by up to 30 percent, according to the results of a randomized, controlled trial, the initial findings of which I reported on back in August. Results from the so-called TOGETHER study, which tested fluvoxamine and some other treatments, were recently published in The Lancet medical journal.
How does fluvoxamine work in the case of Covid-19? Researchers’ best guess is that it modulates the body’s inflammatory response and reduces lung damage as the immune system fights off the coronavirus.
A 30 percent reduction in hospitalizations and deaths may not strike you as particularly high, but the drug is cheap (only $4 per dose) and has a demonstrated track record of safety (it’s FDA approved), which should strengthen the case for adding it to the global arsenal in the fight against the pandemic.