Key Points
Covid-19, while still very much alive, has for most people diminished to an everyday threat, thanks to vaccines and treatments...
Working off this basis, researchers are trying to hit two birds with one stone: trialing treatments that could alleviate long Covid while at the same time lending weight to certain hypothesesand beginning to defog the mystifying condition..
Akiko Iwasaki, an immunologist at Yale University, is running a randomized controlled trial of 100 long Covid patients toinvestigate whether Pfizers antiviral drug, Paxlovid, designed to treat symptomatic Covid, could actually help treat long Covida theory that hasanecdotal backing from patients..
In the UK, a trial calledStimulate-ICP is looking at using a blood thinner called rivaroxaban to treat microclots in the blood, as somecontend that these cause long Covid by blocking oxygen delivery to tissues in the body...
Banerjee says the drugs being tested are probably not tackling the underlying mechanisms of long Covid, but rather the mechanisms of the major symptomstheyre treating the microclots, not what causes them...
