No additional CoViD-19 deaths in B.C. for 6th straight day

VANCOUVER -- For the sixth consecutive day, British Columbia has seen no additional deaths from COVID-19, health officials announced Thursday.

They also announced eight additional testpositive cases of the virus, bringing the total identified since the coronavirus pandemic began to 2,783.

Of that total, there are 190 active cases of the virus, including 10 people who are hospitalized, five of whom are in intensive care.

You’re describing systemic failure from a number of institutions. How did we get to this point? In 2009, when there was pandemic influenza, the prevailing thought was that it was just too complicated to do proper studies in the midst of an emergency. In retrospect, there were so many missed opportunities. In Ebola, 2014, this changed, thanks a lot to the U.S., which insisted that we adhere to high standards of science. The U.S. government helped lead the efforts to conduct proper studies, not only for vaccines, but also for therapeutics against Ebola. That was a paradigm shift.

Going back to the 2009 pandemic flu, the FDA issued an emergency use authorization for peramivir, an investigational flu drug that was at an advanced stage of clinical development. The U.S. government back then did not think it could do a randomized controlled study in the middle of a pandemic. Because there was tremendous demand for this drug, it turned out that it took two more years for the company to actually accrue enough patients to enroll in the proper clinical studies that actually demonstrated that the drug had no value in the population. It didn’t really help the population for which we issued the emergency authorization. Imagine how quickly this could have been demonstrated if it had been done in the pandemic, given how many cases were there.

I thought we had moved on. So it was so surprising to me to have the Covid pandemic and see the number of studies, not just in the U.S., but globally, that were designed in such a manner that do not yield results that can be interpreted, neither with respect to safety or efficacy. And then you end up with the pile of confusion.

How much of this is because the government officials you described as stepping up in Ebola are not doing what they should now?