Norman Swan
speaker
10,140 appearances
108 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2020
last heard 11 Aug
Norman Swan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.
Appearances
So you're absolutely right.
If you go back to the beginning of Coronacast, 300 years ago, what the experts were saying was that a vaccine is probably not going to happen here.
There's been no successful vaccines against this kind of respiratory virus.
Where you're going to get your benefit is indeed from treatments.
And that's where you're going to see this great revolution.
And that fact hasn't happened.
And just before I get to the Pfizer one, so where we got to with treatment was hydroxychloroquine didn't work.
Ivermectin may work a little bit, but it's really doubtful.
But steroids do work, and that was shown by the British, and reduced mortality by about 20%.
Remdesivir is pretty disappointing in terms of
It probably just reduces hospitalization a little bit, but doesn't do an awful lot of good.
And anti-HIV drugs didn't work and so on.
But this comes to the Pfizer drug is actually not that dissimilar to some anti-HIV drugs because it's called a protease inhibitor.
So what it does is it inhibits replication of the virus, which is what protease inhibitors that are geared towards HIV do as well.
And that's what they're aiming to do, so that it attacks the specific proteases involved.
So a protease is an enzyme that's required
for viruses to replicate themselves.
And the inhibitor inhibits that enzyme and therefore prevents replication.
So that's what they're trying to do.
Very successful in HIV.
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