Old drugs and an old supplement; new cheap weapons against the virus

By Jerome Burne

Lockdown and social isolation are drastic and magic money-tree expensive solutions to the Covid-19 crisis, but they are essential because the alternative would be even worse. If only we had a way of tacking the virus directly. Something that cut your risk of getting it and reduced the time in intensive care if you had a serious infection. 

Remarkably we do. Or, to be more precise, we have two cheap, old and unpatentable but very safe treatments, each of which has promising evidence that they could improve your protection and reduce your time in intensive care if that became necessary. But outside China, they are being ignored.

The catch is that one is vitamin C, which the medical profession has claimed for decades does little more than produce expensive urine, while the other is an ancient, pre-statin, very cheap heart drug that is rarely used called Dipyridamole (DIM). 

However, it looks as if vitamin C is coming in from the cold and the refusal of the pharmaceutical industry to investigate unprofitable drugs such as DIM will have to change. The Chinese medical establishment doesn’t share Western medical prejudice against vitamin C and both treatments are being seriously tested against Covid-19. Results so far are promising.  (more…)