As France enters its 24th day of confinement on Thursday, Jean Mariani, doctor and professor at the Sorbonne faculty of medicine, reviewed on France 24 on Thursday the various therapeutic trials and treatments used to combat Covid-19 .

"There are a multiplicity of clinical trials which all have different targets", he summarizes, before recalling that a vaccine, "better solution" against the eradication of Covid-19 according to him, will not be available "before several months, a year or even a year and a half".

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Pending the sale of a vaccine, there are drugs called antivirals, such as chloroquine, which may help treat patients with Covid-19. These antivirals "are the subject of a combined therapeutic trial called Discovery in Europe", comments Jean Mariani.

The director of the Institute of Longevity also quotes "the use of antibodies in subjects who have been infected". This is "plasma therapy", which aims to inject the antibodies of a former patient into the body of a person affected by Covid-19.

Another solution: "symptomatic treatment", according to Jean Mariani. Mainly intended to treat severe forms of the disease, it consists in trying to "make patients survive as long as possible in intensive care, sometimes with a very difficult passage by remaining in incubation and artificial respiration", he explains.

"No real treatment"

According to the doctor, research is underway to improve this type of treatment. "To increase survival, there is the possibility of acting using data from research on the biology of aging," says Jean Mariani. The aim is thus to "find a class of drugs to increase the patient's resilience", which the professor defines as "the ability of an individual to resist aggression".

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Experiments are also underway on serological tests. The objective is to "find the antibodies which testify that the individual has been infected and that he is protected", according to Jean Mariani. "The problem is that we need time because even when antibody detection tests are produced, it is essential to check their reliability."

"Currently, this reliability is not fully established (...). We cannot afford not to have, in particular within the framework of a massive screening, extremely reliable tests", points out the specialist. He takes the example of Spain "which ordered several hundred thousand tests in China which it was forced to throw away because they were not reliable".

Before treating the patients, Jean Mariani reminds us that it is necessary "to detect infected subjects, separate them from healthy subjects and then possibly treat them". However, according to him, "currently, there is no real treatment", which explains why confinement was chosen as an "inevitable" interim solution.

Jean Mariani then insists on a fatal error in the management of the crisis: precipitation. "This pandemic is going very fast but this urgency should not make us forget that we must demonstrate by medicine the effectiveness of a certain number of treatments."

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