Minister of Health, Dr Frank Anthony yesterday announced that late last year Guyana had introduced a new drug for the treatment of COVID-19 patients and hopes to have another drug here soon to aid in the treatment of persons with mild to moderate COVID-19.
This disclosure was made during the minister’s daily COVID-19 update where he stated that the authorities have used a number of medications to treat patients who have severe COVID. He noted that they started using Remdesivir sometime last year and have seen good results.
Further, just last month health officials started the use of Baricitinib which is an oral drug used for the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis. According to the World Health Organisation (WHO) which recommended the use of the medication late last week to treat COVID-19, the drug is recommended for patients with severe or critical COVID-19.
The WHO in a statement informed that the medication is part of a class of drugs called ‘janus kinase inhibitors’ which suppress the overstimulation of the immune system.
“We recognized that it had good potential and we imported Baricitinib into the country and started using it,” the minister noted, adding that while the WHO had only recently recommended the medication, authorities here were ahead in terms of making use of the drug for COVID-19 patients that were in hospital.
Additionally, he stated that local authorities here have noted that Pfizer has produced the anti-viral drug Paxlovid, while Merck has produced one called Molnupiravir to treat persons with COVID-19. While acknowledging that there has been a global shortage of Paxlovid due to the more developed countries purchasing a majority of the supplies, he assured that the ministry is working on getting the Molnupiravir into Guyana.
“This can be used with patients with mild to moderate COVID and with the potential of them developing severe forms of COVID so there’s a course of treatment that can be given and hopefully within another week or so we should be able to have the Merck drug available locally”, he said.
