Cholesterol Drug Could Downgrade Covid-19 Severity To Common Cold

Wow. I read a very encouraging report this morning over on NewsMax of a recent scientific finding that may become an effective and cheap treatment for Coronavirus Covid-19 — from researchers at Israel’s Hebrew University of Jerusalem and New York’s Mount Sinai Medical Center.

The original source information is from a news report from the Jerusalem Post.

Hebrew U. scientist: Drug could eradicate COVID-19 from lungs in days.

Researchers believe they could potentially downgrade COVID-19’s severity into nothing worse than a common cold.

New research revealed that the FDA-approved drug Fenofibrate (Tricor) could reduce SARS-CoV-2’s ability to reproduce or even make it disappear.

Researchers: Hebrew University Prof. Ya’acov Nahmias and Sinai’s Dr. Benjamin tenOever

“Viruses are parasites,” “They cannot replicate themselves. They cannot make new viruses. They have to get inside a human cell and then hijack that cell,” explained Nahmias.

Nahmias and tenOever spent the last three months studying what SARS-CoV-2 is doing to human lung cells. What they found is that the novel coronavirus prevents the routine burning of carbohydrates, which results in large amounts of fat accumulating inside lung cells – a condition the virus needs to reproduce.

“By understanding how the SARS-CoV-2 controls our metabolism, we can wrestle back control from the virus and deprive it from the very resources it needs to survive,” Nahmias said, noting that it also may help explain why patients with high blood sugar and cholesterol levels are often at a particularly high risk to develop COVID-19.

The team then reviewed a panel of eight already-approved drugs that could possibly interfere with the virus’s ability to reproduce. Tricor caused the cells to start burning fat, Nahmias said.

The result was that the virus almost completely disappeared within only five days of treatment.

The experiment was done in lab studies both in Israel and New York and was replicated several times with different lung samples. Nahmias said there is a strong indication that the experiment is highly repeatable in other labs.

The team is advancing to animal studies in New York and hoping to fast-track clinical studies in both Israel and the US within the next couple of weeks, since the drug is already proven safe.

The study is being published in this week’s Cell Press’s Sneak Peak. The work is being funded by the European Research Council, the Nikoh Foundation and the Sam and Rina Frankel Foundation.

Also, a few thoughts about this… The science above is what I would call “real science”. Research. Whereas there is way too much “political science” these days. Therefore I am concerned that findings like this could be ‘swept under the rug’. Why? Because it would become a HUGE problem for those entities who want to keep their wrecking-ball smashing our economy and Trump’s chances for a November victory. And, there’s no Big Money in it for Big Pharma (if the research above proves out). “It’s a cheap cure. We can’t have that.”

This treatment would be absolutely fantastic, and it sounds (based on the reporting) very promising.

I’m putting it out there in case you never hear about it anywhere else.

Good news for a change… (potentially good news).

In fact, I think I’m going to email the sourced report to my own physician, just so he knows!