Fauci delivers good news and bad news

“The data shows that remdesivir has a clear-cut, significant, positive effect in diminishing the time to recovery,” Fauci said.

A senior administration official told the New York Times that the Food and Drug Administration is preparing to grant the drug Emergency Use Authorization in order to make it commercially available. The FDA has not yet approved any coronavirus treatment, but remdesivir could be the first to be approved in the near future.

The trial results are not conclusive and will be sent to a peer-reviewed journal. Further trials will show the effectiveness of combining remdesivir with an anti-inflammatory, which infectious disease experts think could be used to treat COVID-19.

Gilead Sciences, which manufactures HIV PrEP drugs, released results Wednesday from the third phase of trials, finding that people could potentially be treated with just five days of remdesivir. Dr. Merdad Parsey, Gilead’s chief medical officer, said that if future trials prove a person can recover in about five days, healthcare providers “could significantly expand the number of patients who could be treated with our current supply of remdesivir.”

“This is particularly important in the setting of a pandemic, to help hospitals and healthcare workers treat more patients in urgent need of care,” Parsey said.

Former FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb called it “a beginning: The start of our ability to build a much better toolbox to combat the infection, mitigate risk today as well as from outbreaks that are likely to occur this Fall.”

Shares of Gilead soared 6%, and the news boosted the S&P 500 up 2.6% on the day.

Not long after, Fauci delivered the bad news: A second wave of the coronavirus is “inevitable.”

If states reopen too quickly without seeing a decline in new cases, Fauci said, the coronavirus could reappear later this year and erase progress states have made in slowing the spread, according to CNN.

The severity of the second outbreak depends on how well the United States is able to mitigate further spread now.

“If by that time we have put into place all of the countermeasures that you need to address this, we should do reasonably well,” Fauci said. “If we don’t do that successfully, we could be in for a bad fall and a bad winter.”

Over 1 million cases have been reported in the U.S., and at least 60,300 have died, according to Johns Hopkins University.

President Trump said in Wednesday’s Oval Office meeting with Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards that social distancing guidelines, set to expire tomorrow, will begin “fading out” as states begin reopening.

“They’ll be fading now because the governors are doing it,” Trump said. “We’re speaking to a lot of different people, and they’re explaining what they’re doing, and I am very much in favor of what they’re doing.”

Vice President Mike Pence did not say if guidelines would be extended, but rather that the guidelines “are very much incorporated in the guidance that we’re giving states to open up America again.”

The Trump administration is launching “Operation Warp Speed,” Bloomberg reported, to cut vaccine development time by as much as eight months. There is no precedent for such rapid vaccine development, and one administration official said the goal is to have 300 million doses available by January 2021.

The economy contracted the fastest since the Great Recession in the first quarter of 2020. The Commerce Department reported that gross domestic product shrank at a 4.8% annual rate. Economists expect that the figures will be far worse in the second quarter, which will more fully capture the extent of business closures meant to slow the spread of the virus. The Federal Reserve announced Wednesday that it would keep rates near zero to support the economy, and Chairman Jerome Powell pledged that the central bank would use its “tools to assure that the recovery, when it comes, will be as robust as possible.”