No Medication Has Been Confirmed Effective And Licenced For COVID-19 – PTF Coordinator

The National Coordinator of the Presidential Task Force (PTF) on COVID-19, Dr Sani Aliyu, has said no medication has been licenced for treating COVID-19 patients in the country.

Dr Aliyu stated this on Wednesday while appearing on a television interview monitored by this credible online news platform

The PTF coordinator, who was debunking reports that some drugs and local herbs are available as cure for COVID-19, insisted that no medication has been confirmed for the disease.

“I must make it very clear at the moment, there is no medication that has been confirmed to be effective and licenced for COVID-19 infection, None,” Dr Aliyu said.

He, however, noted that the United States of America had given temporal approval for the use of an anti-viral drug called Remdesivir for a clinical trial in the quest to find a cure for the pandemic.

Remdesivir is an antiviral drug initially developed to treat Ebola which was given after a major trial found that it boosted recovery in serious COVID-19 patients.

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The approval is the latest step in a global push to find viable treatments and a vaccine for the coronavirus, which has left half of humanity under some form of lockdown, hammered the world economy, and infected more than 3.3 million people.

The Minister of Health, Dr Osagie Ehanire, shared a similar view last week, stressing that there was no cure yet for the disease but research was ongoing.

“Yes, chloroquine has been touted as the drug that might be quite useful in dealing with COVID-19, but nothing has been confirmed yet. In Nigeria, doctors are also still trying to figure out how to treat patients,” Dr Ehanire had said during one of the PTF briefings.

“Clinical trials and other processes are ongoing to validate various therapeutics for COVID-19 treatment”.

As at today, the Nigeria Centre For Disease Control (NCDC), confirmed 148 new COVID-19 cases in the country, taking Nigeria’s total cases to 2,950.

Of the new cases, 43 are in Lagos, 32 are in Kano, while 14 are in Zamfara.

Ten are in the FCT, nine in Katsina, seven in Taraba, six in Borno and Ogun, five in Oyo, three in Edo, Kaduna and Bauchi, two in Adamawa and Gombe, and one each in Plateau, Sokoto and Kebbi.