What are the alternatives to coronavirus vaccinations if for some reason you are unable or unwilling to have one of the new vaccines?
Whist the vaccination program has been a great success in the UK with 4 of the 9 most vulnerable groups already having received their first dose at mid February 2021 some people can’t receive that protection for medical reasons.
What then are the alternative treatments for those who might still get infected by the virus?
The Recovery Trial -Old drug treatments.
The Recovery Trial is a project that examines existing dugs and evaluates their effectiveness by running tries based in Oxford.
There is no doubt that the Recovery Trials at Oxford have been a success they have made available drugs such as dexamethasone, a commonly used steroid which has been found to be effective in treating patients infected with coronavirus.
In addition we now have Tocilizumab is another anti-inflammatory treatment which also shows a clear effect in combatting Covid-19. being used previously to treat rheumatoid arthritis, it targets the cytokine interleukin IL-6 and blocks inflammatory effect.The same trials have now also proved that hydroxychloroquine, Azithromycin and Lopinavir have no observable effects in the treatment of covid-19 despite previous claims. As mentioned later in the article Regeneron monoclonal antibodies are also being examined in the trial.
An analysis showed that tocilizumab can be used in conjunction with dexamethasone. It found that nearly half of all people hospitalised would benefit from the drug. New additions to the trial include aspirin and colchicine.
Israeli Covid Treatment – New Drug Treatments
Whilst it may be too early to say for definite, Israel is working on two drugs EXO-CD24 and Allocetra that seem extremely effective against coronavirus infections. The first is an inhaled treatment that calms “cytokine tornado” that the virus initiates. This is a situation where the body’s immune system over reacts and attacks itself as it tries to defeat the virus. Of the 30 patients only one of them failed to recover in 3-5 days, that patient still recovered but it took a little longer.
Allocetra is an experimental Covid-19 immunotherapy medication, in phase 2 trials it was found that 19 out of 21 patients treated with Allocetra recovered within 5-6 days and that included patients deemed vulnerable being overweight and having high blood pressure.
Monoclonal antibodies.
Monoclonal antibodies differ from convalescent plasma treatments where plasma containing antibodies from recovered Covid-19 patients is used to fight off the virus. Monoclonal antibodies are basically lab made antibodies. A recent example is a biopharmaceutical company in New Hampshire called Adimab isolated antibodies from the immune cells of a person who had recovered from the virus SARS-CoV in 2003 which is related to SARS-CoV-2 the current coronavirus.
By manipulating the structure of the antibodies, they created one, called ADG-2, that was particularly effective at disabling SARS-CoV-2.
They found that ADG-2 targets receptors found on the surface of SARS-CoV-2 but not only the current coronavirus but a range of similar coronaviruses. This seems to be a vulnerable spot for the virus.
Monoclonal antibody treatments simply make artificially these antibodies in bulk and treat the infected patients. Results are good as it is simply one type of antibody whereas convalescent plasma contains a range of different proteins that are not always suited to the new patient they are treating.
