Carl Hennigan

But that's when you need the treatments to work.

And if we can't grasp this idea of equipoise, we can't grasp the idea that we

really do need to do clinical trials globally in a highly robust way, we are going to walk out of this just going, we didn't learn very much in terms of effective treatment.

Yeah, I think that's where the repurposing of established treatments that are already available is potentially more of importance for this outbreak versus new treatments for the next one.

Because it's the chloroquine's are

They're available and can be rolled out if they show to be beneficial.

But the newer drugs, there's a problem with upscaling the manufacturing.

And I'm hearing that's going to take six months if you want to get significant number of doses out there.

Well, that's the second peak or the next outbreak.

So I think new drugs will not be available in the wide scale that's required now.

You're picking up on a very important point, Duncan, this idea that in this position, you'd need to have a legislation that would allow other manufacturers to make and distribute the drug.

So you'd have to take almost a sort of governmental position where you'd say the manufacturer is going to be a public entity.

They would not like that in any sense whatsoever, but that's what would be required if it was going to be significantly effective.

Yeah, you know, one of my all-time favourite papers is the Richard Dole Smoking British Doctors Study in the 1950s with over 50 years of follow-up.

Whenever you give up, you'll get huge benefits.

And there's clear evidence that if you smoke, you increase your risk of complications with respiratory infections,

You lead to conditions like chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, COPD, which is on the Act Risk Register.

So in a time like this, this is a perfect time to roll out some public health messages and encourage people to quit.

Now, if you really wanted to do something in the next 12 weeks and improve public health,

You could either keep everybody locked down and ruin the economy, or you could say, actually, we're going to have a ban on cigarettes right now for the next 12 weeks and get everybody off them.