Gilead's Remdesivir Cuts Risk of COVID-19 Death by 62% -- Maybe

Gilead Sciences' (NASDAQ: GILD) remdesivir cut the risk of death by 62% in severe COVID-19 patients. After 14 days, 7.6% of severe COVID-19 patients treated with remdisivir had died compared to 12.5% of patient who didn't receive the drug.

While the results, which were presented at the Virtual COVID-19 Conference as part of the 23rd International AIDS Conference, sound great, they come from a retrospective analysis comparing results from two different data sources. The remdesivir mortality rate comes from results of patients in Gilead's phase 3 SIMPLE-Severe clinical trial. But that study didn't have a placebo control, so Gilead compared the remdesivir results with a real-world retrospective cohort of severe COVID-19 patients who were treated with standard of care.

The results are likely to be in the ballpark of being accurate, but without prospectively enrolling patients and randomizing them to remdesivir or placebo, there's no way to know for sure whether remdesivir was the only factor that contributed to the difference.

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Source Fool.com