more than 500 tourist

More than 500 tourists still stuck in Maldives. Russia’s PM tests positive. UK is ‘past its peak’, Johnson says.

More than 500 tourists still stuck in Maldives. Russia’s PM tests positive. UK is ‘past its peak’, Johnson says.

CNN senior medical correspondent Elizabeth Cohen.
CNN senior medical correspondent Elizabeth Cohen. CNN

 

A lot of things need to happen to get a coronavirus vaccine on the market in the United States, CNN senior medical correspondent Elizabeth Cohen said on CNN’s town hall.

Seven companies in human clinical trials: «There are actually dozens of companies that have told the World Health Organization they are working on vaccines. Only seven of them that we know of are actually in human clinical trials,» Cohen said. «And that started awhile ago.»

Timeline: «There are so many ‘ifs’ here. The clinical trials have to go very quickly, the FDA has to move quickly. There are a lot of things that need to happen to get a vaccine on the market in the US by the end of this calendar year,» she said.

Remdesivir: One potential treatment that has gotten a lot of attention is remdesivir. Cohen said that preliminary data was released this week but caution should be taken. «We have not seen it published in a medical journal and that is an important point to make,» she said.

«It was developed for Ebola years ago and it didn’t work very well for Ebola and it’s never been on the market for anything,» she said. «When they gave it to very sick patients hospitalized with Covid-19, what they found was that it cut down on the amount of time it took for recovery.»

Read more on the drug here: