The COVID-19 Novel Corona Virus Pandemic has been raging unabated across the world and having gone beyond the point of fighting it, now people are learning to live with it, in what is being dubbed the "new normal"! However, this has not stopped doctors, scientists and researchers from giving up on their search to identify vaccines to combat this deadly Virus. Though a couple of vaccine candidates has been registered by Russia, there are some question marks over their efficacy as they have not yet undergone the extensive Phase 3 clinical trials as yet. Meanwhile, we hear that there are about 15 other vaccine candidates, which are in the end level of testing and could be approved and move into production, in the near future. All this on one hand, till the time a vaccine is found, healthcare professionals have to still treat the currently infected people and over the past several months, a variety of medicines have been tried out!

At the beginning of the Corona Virus oubreak, most of the medical fraternity especially the US President Donald Trump, advocated the use of Hydroxychloroquine to treat COVID infected people. However, there were a lot of dissuading voices, as the side effects of this drug could do more damage than the good it would do in treating COVID. Several other medicines and in some cases, a combination of a number of medicines have been used to treat COVID patients. For quite some time now, the drug Remdesivir is being used by doctors across the world to treat Corona affected patients, though it has not been officially approved as a treatment for COVID-19. The US Food and Drug Administration has now approved the use of the antiviral drug Veklury (Remdesivir) for treating COVID infected adult & paediatric patients over the age of 12 and weighing atleast 40 kgs. 

The FDA has given approval but with quite a few stipulations and does not include the entire population that had been given authorisation to use Veklury under an Emergency Use Authorisation (EUA), issued on May 1st, 2020! The FDA Commissioner said, "The FDA is committed to expediting the development and availability of COVID-19 treatments during this unprecedented public health emergency." Veklury was approved after analysing data from three random, controlled clinical trials of this drug on mild-to-severe COVID-19 infected patients, who had been hospitalised.