Before misinformation about COVID-19 vaccines was even a twinkle in a conspiracy theorist’s eye, there was remdesivir.
The antiviral drug was the first COVID-19 treatment authorized in the U.S. early in the pandemic, and some social users baselessly argued then that influential billionaires such as Microsoft Corp. co-founder Bill Gates and philanthropist George Soros, helped push remdesivir over the cheaper hydroxychloroquine, an antimalarial drug touted by then-President Donald Trump.
More false allegations followed, alleging that remdesivir was killing COVID-19 patients, rather than helping them, claims that PolitiFact and other fact-checkers have previously debunked.
Yet the claim continues to flourish on social media.
“Hospitals murdered COVID patients,” sticker text on a June 24 Instagram video said.
The video showed a speaker who said that in 2018, remdesivir was “too unethical” to use in Ebola clinical trials in Africa because it had a “53% kill rate.”
This post was flagged as part of Meta’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram.)
The video’s speaker is David Martin, a financial analyst and entrepreneur who has previosuly shared COVID-19 misinformation and appeared in the discredited “Plandemic” documentary series. Martin shared the same video that had been on Instagram on March 12 on his Facebook page.
We contacted Martin for comment through a Facebook message and through two of his business websites, but received no response.
The Instagram post is wrong about remdesivir killing patients.
We wrote in 2022 that studies have shown various degrees of the drug’s effectiveness against COVID-19, but none have shown it was killing patients. Because it was initially approved only for hospitalized patients, many people taking it early in the pandemic were already severely ill with the virus, experts said.
Remdesivir, sold under the brand name Veklury, was the first COVID-19 treatment approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. The FDA approved it Oct. 22, 2020, for people ages 12 and older requiring hospitalization to treat COVID-19. It received emergency use authorization in May of that year. The FDA expanded its use in January 2022 to high-risk patients not sick enough to be hospitalized.
Remdesivir is still approved by the FDA and listed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as a COVID-19 treatment, but other medications, such as Paxlovid, have also emerged.
An FDA spokesperson told PolitiFact in an email that when it grants a drug approval, it means the product has been tested rigorously for safety. Veklury’s approval, the spokesperson said, was supported by the agency’s analysis of data from three randomized, controlled clinical trials that included patients hospitalized with mild-to-severe COVID-19.
A study published in January in the medical journal Infectious Diseases and Therapy said clinical trials and observational studies show remdesivir may improve survival in patients with varying severity of COVID-19. It also said new and ongoing studies support its early use in patients with the virus.
Martin, in the Instagram video, also distorted what a 2018-19 Ebola clinical trial said about remdesivir. The 53% “kill rate” he mentions refers to the mortality rate of Ebola patients taking remdesivir in the trial, not that it caused the deaths of 53% of patients who took the drug.
Remdesivir was one of four drugs used in a clinical trial of 681 Ebola patients beginning in November 2018 in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where Ebola had broken out in August.
The video showed a screenshot of an article published by Drugs in Context, an open-access medical journal. The article — titled “The journey of remdesivir: from Ebola to COVID-19” — was published May 22, 2020.
The Instagram video highlighted one sentence in the article about the Ebola trials that said, “At day 28, mortality rates were: remdesivir (53.1%), ZMapp (49.7%), MAb114 (35.1%), and REGN-EB3 (33.5%). For remdesivir, 85 and 29% of patients with high- and low-viral loads at baseline died, respectively.”
The article did not say remdesivir, or any of the trial drugs, caused the Ebola patients’ deaths. It said that despite success in animal models against Ebola virus, remdesivir’s use against human Ebola virus had “disappointing results.”
The clinical trial study’s authors also did not say remdesivir caused patients’ deaths.
The study said that after Aug. 9, 2019, based on the mortality rates of patients taking each drug, the data and safety monitoring board recommended that patients no longer be given remdesivir and another drug, ZMapp, for the rest of the trial. That was because two experimental drugs in the trial proved to be more effective, the study said.
The study did not say remdesivir caused any patients’ deaths, just that it was less effective than the other treatments.
An Instagram post’s claim that hospitals killed COVID-19 patients with remdesivir is baseless and its claim that the drug had a 53% kill rate in Ebola trials distorts what those trials showed. Both claims are False.