In a large, randomized clinical trial conducted with thousands of patients over the past six months, researchers at McMaster University tested eight different Covid-19 treatments against a control group to figure out what works.
One drug stood out: fluvoxamine, an antidepressant that the Food and Drug Administration has already found to be safe and that’s cheap to produce as a generic drug.
These new results follow some promising findings in small-scale trials last year. In those smaller studies, researchers found that fluvoxamine was strikingly good at reducing hospitalization for Covid-19 patients — but small-scale trials can sometimes turn up spurious good results, so those findings were obviously tempered by a lot of caveats.
This study, called the TOGETHER study, is a lot bigger — more than 3,000 patients across the whole study, with 800 in the fluvoxamine group — and supports the promising results from those previous studies. The authors released it this week as a preprint, meaning that it is still under peer review.
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2261 ... y-mcmaster