Covid-19 News

Belgian Virologist Proposes a Plan to Eradicate COVID-19 in 6 Weeks Using Ivermectin

https://trialsitenews.com/belg…6-weeks-using-ivermectin/

As recently reported in the publication Hospital Pharmacy Europe a Belgium virologist named Marc Wathelet argues for the immediate use of ivermectin as a low-cost, off-label treatment to get the pandemic under control in Belgium. After providing a brief history of the first attempts at repurposing at the pandemic onset, Dr. Wathelet suggests after one year, and billions spent by governments such as those from America, only one drug is actually proven to have benefits—dexamethasone from the RECOVERY trial for patients who were already hypoxemic. Dr. Wathelet introduces the drug TrialSite has chronicled since April but that the rest of the world is just learning about- ivermectin. Referencing the meta-analysis from Dr. Tess Lawrie in the UK, the Belgian virologist shares that based on 15 randomized controlled trials and observational controlled trials, the ivermectin treatment reduces deaths by an average of 83% (95% Cl 65%-92%). He shares that based on the Dr. Lawrie meta-analysis, the drug also reduces the risk of deterioration by 53% (95% Cl 23%-71). Furthermore, Wathelet cites Lawrie that the drug used as prophylaxis given to health care workers or relatives can reduce the risk of infection by 88% (95% Cl 82%-92%). He aligns with America-based Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC) Wathelet suggesting a “Multi-pronged approach” to treating COVID-19, including treatments used at early onset, vaccines, social distancing and other measures such as face masks.

With about 11.5 million people, Belgium experienced a scary spike in the pandemic during the month of November. The total number of cases has declined, but nonetheless, the country still reports between 15,00 and 2,500 cases per day. In total, Belgium has recorded 735,220 cases with 21,599 deaths.

In addition to discussing dosage scenarios recently in Hospital Pharmacy Europe, the Belgian virologist wonders aloud with the audience what’s the root cause of the resistance to the use of the drug? Reviewing each ostensibly scientific objection, the virologist comes to the conclusion that implementing such a plan as the one he ponders would require “tremendous leadership.”

Interesting, seems the sun does have something to do with the rise and fall iin cases of covid. Here is a list of solar activity in 2020, notice that solar flares begin in may about the time the virus mutated to 614, more activity in August, kent mutation, south african, brazil's. More activity in November , more mutations in US. Something to think about. Next wave is coming.

Top 50 solar flares of the year 2020

https://www.spaceweatherlive.c…lar-flares/year/2020.html

Is the 2019 novel coronavirus related to a spike of cosmic rays?

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7529058/

On December 31, 2019, a cluster of pneumonia of unknown etiology was reported in Wuhan City, Hubei Province of China. Although the outbreak of pneumonia was determined to be caused by the 2019 Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19), the true cause of its sudden emergence remains unclear.

K.G. Andersen, recently wrote in Nature Medicine that scientific evidences show that the new coronavirus is the result of natural evolution, not laboratory synthesis (Andersen, Rambaut, Lipkin, et al., 2020). Here, we can scientifically explain this conclusion in further. Generally speaking, there are several ways that are normally considered for the emergence of new viruses. One is that these are viruses that exist in nature but have not yet been detected and suddenly emerge in humans through cross-species transmission, or transfer from the atmosphere; the other is that endemic viruses undergo gene recombination, mutation to finally generate new pathogens. SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV are both presumably recombinants (Huang, Liu, Xu, et al., 2016; Sabir, Lam, Ahmed, et al., 2016), and our previous studies have shown that their emergence were somehow associated with double peaks in the sunspot cycle in 2002 and 2012 (Qu & Wickramasinghe, 2017). The Novel Coronavirus has been argued by some to have gained the ability to infect people through gene recombination and thus ultimately create a major public health threat on a world-wide scale (Ji, Wang, Zhao, et al., 2020).

According to the data of Sunspot Index and Long-Term Solar Observations, we are now approaching the deepest sunspot minimum for a century. There were 273 spotless days in 2019 and no sunspots for 40 days from November 14 to December 23, 2019. The Sun's magnetic field is very weak, thus allowing an increased flux of cosmic rays as well as charged dust particles (including viruses) to be incident on the Earth. Neutron counts from Moscow Neutron Monitor show that the flux of cosmic rays reaching Earth in 2019 is at a maximum over a timespan of half a century since 1962. It is of interest to note that immediately prior to the first recorded cases of the novel Corona virus in China a peak of cosmic rays was measured as is indicated by the Huon neutron monitor data in Fig. 1 . Estimates of the timing of the most recent common ancestor of COVID-19 made with current sequence data point to emergence of the virus in late November 2019 to early December 2019, compatible with the earliest retrospectively confirmed cases (Huang et al., 2020) and the cosmic ray spike in late November 2019. Hence, we suggest that this strong cosmic ray spike was in some way connected with the onset of the outbreak.

Quote from Fm1

Is the 2019 novel coronavirus related to a spike of cosmic rays?

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7529058/

On December 31, 2019, a cluster of pneumonia of unknown etiology was reported in Wuhan City, Hubei Province of China. Although the outbreak of pneumonia was determined to be caused by the 2019 Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19), the true cause of its sudden emergence remains unclear.

K.G. Andersen, recently wrote in Nature Medicine that scientific evidences show that the new coronavirus is the result of natural evolution, not laboratory synthesis (Andersen, Rambaut, Lipkin, et al., 2020). Here, we can scientifically explain this conclusion in further. Generally speaking, there are several ways that are normally considered for the emergence of new viruses. One is that these are viruses that exist in nature but have not yet been detected and suddenly emerge in humans through cross-species transmission, or transfer from the atmosphere; the other is that endemic viruses undergo gene recombination, mutation to finally generate new pathogens. SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV are both presumably recombinants (Huang, Liu, Xu, et al., 2016; Sabir, Lam, Ahmed, et al., 2016), and our previous studies have shown that their emergence were somehow associated with double peaks in the sunspot cycle in 2002 and 2012 (Qu & Wickramasinghe, 2017). The Novel Coronavirus has been argued by some to have gained the ability to infect people through gene recombination and thus ultimately create a major public health threat on a world-wide scale (Ji, Wang, Zhao, et al., 2020).

According to the data of Sunspot Index and Long-Term Solar Observations, we are now approaching the deepest sunspot minimum for a century. There were 273 spotless days in 2019 and no sunspots for 40 days from November 14 to December 23, 2019. The Sun's magnetic field is very weak, thus allowing an increased flux of cosmic rays as well as charged dust particles (including viruses) to be incident on the Earth. Neutron counts from Moscow Neutron Monitor show that the flux of cosmic rays reaching Earth in 2019 is at a maximum over a timespan of half a century since 1962. It is of interest to note that immediately prior to the first recorded cases of the novel Corona virus in China a peak of cosmic rays was measured as is indicated by the Huon neutron monitor data in Fig. 1 . Estimates of the timing of the most recent common ancestor of COVID-19 made with current sequence data point to emergence of the virus in late November 2019 to early December 2019, compatible with the earliest retrospectively confirmed cases (Huang et al., 2020) and the cosmic ray spike in late November 2019. Hence, we suggest that this strong cosmic ray spike was in some way connected with the onset of the outbreak.

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The WHO said Sars-Cov was a lab leak and published this. If it was cosmic rays and (viruses) why did people in September 2019 have antibodies? Why does the author not do a literature review and explain these simple facts to test his theory?

Quote from Alan Smith

I have at times last year has some pretty high-energy cosmic ray strikes in the lab- sufficient to create clouds of secondaries that set all 8 Geigers that were running at that bleeping in unison.

Did you record the dates? If so look at community spread in your area a few days after the recorded dates.

Quote from Navid

The WHO said Sars-Cov was a lab leak and published this. If it was cosmic rays and (viruses) why did people in September 2019 have antibodies? Why does the author not do a literature review and explain these simple facts to test his theory?

It was a lab leak? The WHO published that? Really? Show me!

Quote from Fm1

t was a lab leak? The WHO published that

The WHO means different people at different times,,like a revolving door,

so it is very easy for diiferent media to 'report;" diiferently.

Also the expert statements diplomatically vary depending on whether they are made as guests of the CCP

or beyond their reach,

"Prof Watson also said the possibility that the virus which causes Covid-19 was spread from a laboratory in Wuhan “remained on the table”.

"

Last week, a team of experts from China and the WHO concluded that it was “extremely unlikely” that the virus entered the human population as a result of a laboratory-related incident.

Prof Watson said the most likely source remained an “animal reservoir somewhere and that the infection got to humans, probably, through an intermediate host”.

https://www.independent.co.uk/…ation-china-b1802081.html

Number of Israelis reinfected by South African variant rises to 3, raising concerns

https://www.washingtonpost.com…story.html?outputType=amp

TEL AVIV — Israel's Health Ministry says two more Israelis who had recently recovered from the coronavirus were reinfected by the variant first identified in South Africa, bringing the total of such cases to three.

The announcement Sunday came as Israel was finally beginning to see a drop in infection rates as a result of its nationwide vaccination drive.

AstraZeneca Vaccine Preprint Does Not Bode Well for COVID-19 Variant Response

https://www.contagionlive.com/…covid-19-variant-response

New preprint data suggest the AstraZeneca coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) vaccine may not protect against mild-to-moderate infection due to the South Africa variant.

The to-be-reviewed research, from a team of South African institution investigators and the Oxford Vaccine Group, indicated the modified adenovirus-based vaccine ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 (AZD1222) had a vaccine efficacy of 21.9% (95% CI, -49.9 to 59.8) in protecting from COVID-19 more than 14 days after the booster dose was administered to seronegative patients, versus placebo.

In the 42 endpoint cases of COVID-19 detection, 15 mild cases and 4 moderate cases were observed in participants to receive both ChAdOx1 doses, versus 17 and 6 cases in placebo recipients, respectively.

Among the 41 primary endpoint cases sequenced and classified, 39 (95.1%) were B.1.351 variant infection.

This outcome observed among 700-plus study participants in South Africa is an approximate 54 percentage-point drop in vaccine efficacy previously observed in the same team’s research for the same vaccine—the key difference being that the more transmissible B.1.351 variant has been circulating South Africa during this most recent assessment.

What’s more, tests conducted to observe vaccine-induced antibody neutralization of the vaccine via pseudotyped (PSVNA) and live virus (LVNA) neutralization assays show its effect is lessened against the variant. In fact, the effect is similar to the observed loss of neutralizing activity induced by natural SARS-CoV-2 infection from the first wave versus the B.1.351 variant.

The currently available mRNA COVID-19 vaccines from Pfizer and BioNTech (BNT162b2) and Moderna (mRNA-1273) have had greater neutralizing antibody development after second doses than adenovirus-based vaccines including ChAdOx1 and Sputnik V, but have also been linked to PSVNA neutralization reductions versus B.1.351.

As of this weekend, South Africa's seven-day average for new daily COVID-19 cases was just under 2400. A month prior, it was above 18,000, due to the variant.

Vaccine developers are undergoing feasible efforts to augment prophylaxes in response to such variants spreading more greatly—and as the AstraZeneca investigators noted, differing vaccine products have shown capability to fare differently against unique variants. And what’s more, the team continued to observe vaccine benefit against severe COVID-19, defined as death or hospitalization due to infection, regardless of the variant.

But the findings are a nonetheless troublesome development for a vaccine anticipated to be manufactured at a rate of 3 billion doses this year, at costs lesser than other COVID-19 vaccines.

“Deliberations on the utility of ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 also needs to be considered in the context of ongoing global spread and community transmission of the B.1.351 variant, and evolution of other SARS-CoV-2 lineages that include similar mutations,” investigators wrote.

Last week, on the eve of this preprint data becoming available, South Africa health and legislative authorities announced plans to delay administration of ChAdOx1 nCov-19 to its healthcare workers, as previously planned, and instead immunize them with the single-shot Johnson & Johnson vaccine.

The Johnson & Johnson product Ad26.COV2.S is a recombinant, replication-incompetent adenovirus serotype 26 (Ad26) vector encoding a full-length and stabilized SARS-CoV-2 spike (S) protein. Based on preliminary phase 3 findings, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recently accepted the company’s Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) application and set a Vaccines and Related Biologic Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC) meeting to review its benefit-risk profile on February 26.

In speaking with Contagion® on the matter of the new ChAdOx1 findings, expert vaccinologists stressed the utility of the vaccine in reducing severe COVID-19 disease and hospitalizations. That said, they estimated alteration to the vaccine to appropriate respond to the South Africa variant would take another 6 months, and in the meantime, mRNA platform-based vaccines may be more suitable to respond to more transmissible variants than adenovirus-based vector platforms including ChAdOx1 and Ad26.COV2.S

Breakthrough' COVID-19 reported in 4 fully vaccinated individuals

https://news.google.com/articl…=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US%3Aen

Health officials in Oregon said they are investigating four so-called "breakthrough" cases of coronavirus that were detected in individuals two weeks after they received their second dose of vaccine. The illnesses range from asymptomatic to mild, according to a news release posted Friday.

"Such cases are not unexpected," the news release said. "Clinical trials of both vaccines presently in use included breakthrough cases. In those cases, even though the participants got COVID-19, the vaccines reduced the severity of illness."

Genome sequencing is underway, and officials expect results next week. Two of the cases are located in Yamhill County, and two others are in Lane County. Local health officials are investigating the origins of the four cases.

Quote from Fm1

Breakthrough' COVID-19 reported in 4 fully vaccinated individuals

https://news.google.com/articl…=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US%3Aen

Health officials in Oregon said they are investigating four so-called "breakthrough" cases of coronavirus that were detected in individuals two weeks after they received their second dose of vaccine. The illnesses range from asymptomatic to mild, according to a news release posted Friday.

"Such cases are not unexpected," the news release said. "Clinical trials of both vaccines presently in use included breakthrough cases. In those cases, even though the participants got COVID-19, the vaccines reduced the severity of illness."

Genome sequencing is underway, and officials expect results next week. Two of the cases are located in Yamhill County, and two others are in Lane County. Local health officials are investigating the origins of the four cases.

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This is witchcraft. They are saying that they believe scientifically the vaccine reduced the severity of the illness. That is one of the most garbage unscientific statements I've ever heard.

You are witnessing the willy nilly destruction of science in front of your eyes, because when power gets to tell you do what it wants to make a buck or setup a new market, it only emboldens them because there is no deterrent.

Salaam Sanii bonani.Moweni . Namaste

While the WH 'organization' reinvents the meta-analysis of ivermectin for six more weeks

and a corrupt SAHPRA.. plays politics and places a halt on the AstraZeneca vaccine because of the SA variant.

and South Africa has one thrd of Africa's Covid cases....and half of Africa's deaths

and Merck releases a bizarre statement about no evidence for efficacy and concerns about safety of

3.5 billion doses of ivermectin (TM 14.13)

South African Drs advocate for 'breathing' with Ivermectin

Dr Wicus Nienaber

TM 44.00

if it's my father that's dying and i don't have the tablets because the government has blocked the tablets

i will use whatever i can find and i'll try to use the purest the best

the highest qualitybut i will use what i can find because

the evidence for the efficacy of ivermectin is overwhelming

i can help my family survive in fact if you go back to andrea hill's data

four out of five people that are currently

this moment dying in south africa are dying unnecessarily

if they had ivamectin early on

in the disease we could have saved their lives

Unfortunately not all doctors can read.

Dr. Ebony Hilton." These (ivermectin) trials exclude lots of people ... one of which is me.. I.'m a woman"

One commenter

""Dr. Ebony Hilton shares that we should make sure that this drug is truly safe to treat everyone".

So tell me, Dr. Ebony Hilton, your opinion on injecting people with vaccines

that are barely tested and of which nobody knows the consequences in the long term. Please, enlighten me!

Researchers report a new SARS-CoV-2 variant of concern in Uganda

https://news.google.com/articl…=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US%3Aen

The etiological agent of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) – severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) – was first identified in Wuhan, China, in December 2019. Since then, the virus has infected more than 107 million people worldwide and caused over 2.4 million deaths. Due to its high transmissibility, it has been difficult to contain the virus in an epidemic region.

Towards the latter part of 2020, a new variant of SARS-CoV-2 (lineage B.1.1.7) emerged in England and another one, (B.1.351), also known as 501Y.V2, in South Africa. Both of which are observed to have heightened transmissibility, with some early studies even suggesting an increase in virulence in these mutations.

In a concerning new development, an interdisciplinary research team from Uganda and the UK report the emergence and spread of a new SARS-CoV-2 variant of the A lineage with multiple protein changes throughout the viral genome. The researchers recently released their findings in a preprint on the medRxiv* server

The research team reports the A.23.1 sub-lineage to be the major virus lineage now observed in the Kampala region in Uganda. This sub-lineage is reported to encode multiple spike proteins, nsp6 (nonstructural protein), ORF8 and ORF9 (open reading frames 8 and 9) protein changes. Some of these replacements are predicted to be functionally similar to those observed in lineage B variants of concern (VOCs).

The Kampala region has become an epicenter of viral transmission in the country; 60-80% of the country’s new cases daily have been identified there, from June 2020 to January 2021. The researchers generated the SARS-CoV-2 genomic sequence data to monitor virus movement and changes thereof.

The researchers also report that across the entire region’s epidemic, 39% of the strains can be classified as the major B lineage, whereas 61% are within the A lineage. Interestingly, when the transportation was characterized by land travel (primarily truck drivers’ movements) and no flights, the lineage B.1 strains predominated. Over the course of their study, however, the researchers unexpectedly found that, almost exclusively, the A lineage viruses are found in the Kampala region up to late January 2021.

Mink-derived SARS-CoV-2 mutations reduce antibody effectiveness

https://www.news-medical.net/a…tibody-effectiveness.aspx

The ongoing coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, caused by the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), is thought to be a disease originally occurring in animals but transmitted across the species barrier to human beings, probably through an intermediate host. Following human infection, the virus has been shown to transmit to some pet and farm animals, where it then mutates. A new preprint research paper posted to the bioRxiv* server shows that these mutations disrupt inhibition by neutralizing antibodies, both natural and therapeutic.

History of mink SARS-CoV-2 infection

The American mink is a profitable business focus, farmed for its fur in the Netherlands and many other countries. The first case of SARS-CoV-2 infection in farmed mink on a Dutch farm was identified in April 2020. The application of whole-genome sequencing showed that the virus was acquired from humans.

The infection spread back into farmworkers from the infected animals and then from worker to worker. Similar data were reported from Denmark and then from other countries in Europe, involving both farmed and range-bred mink. In Denmark, this led to the culling of 17 million farmed mink.

The SARS-CoV-2 enters the host cell via its spike protein binding with the angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2), the host cell receptor. The spike protein binds via its receptor-binding domain (RBD) to the receptor and depends on the host protease TMPRSS2 for its priming.

Study aims

The virus in farmed mink has a different genomic composition compared to that in humans, chiefly a deletion of 69/70 in the N-terminal domain of the spike protein, and a combination of Y453F in the RBD, with I692V, M1229I, and S1147L in various parts of the spike protein. The first four have been found to occur together in one variant called the cluster 3 variant.

The current study sought to show whether the Y453F mutation causes changes in the spike protein expression, altered binding to the host cell receptor, and susceptibility to neutralizing antibodies.

The researchers used SARS-CoV-2 spike-expressing vesicular stomatitis virus particles. The spike expressed was of three variants, one expressed by wildtype SARS-CoV-2 and the second with a glycine at position 614, to be the reference for spike variants with the D614G mutation that is now globally dominant. The third was spike protein bearing the mutations found in SARS-CoV-2 isolated from infected mink.

New study shows some COVID-19 patients end up with damage to brains

https://news.google.com/articl…=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US%3Aen

'I think it is critically important that we study this population properly,' said Dr. Avi Nath, the lead researcher on this study and clinical director of the National Institutes of Neurological Disorders and Stroke. 'We hope these results will help doctors understand the full spectrum of problems patients may suffer so that we can come up with better treatments.'

Some COVID-19 patients report non-respiratory symptoms after contracting the virus, including headaches, delirium and mental fog.

Nath and his team at the National Institutes of Health used special, high-powered brain scans to look at the brains of people who died after contracting COVID-19. This was the first study of its kind in the country, published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

The researchers examined the brains of 19 people who died anywhere from several hours to two months after reporting symptoms. They ranged in age from five to 73 years old.

'Some were found dead in bed by their partner or spouse, some were found dead in a nursing home, one guy was found dead on a subway,' Nath explained.

Nath said he was surprised to find almost all of the patients had abnormalities in the brain.

He said bright spots visible on their brain scans represented areas of inflammation. Dark spots represented bleeding in the brain, which Nath said was likely a result of blood vessels leaking.

'If these patients had survived, let's say, could they have had long-term consequences? And the answer is yes. If you've got that kind of pathology in the brain, you've got damage to the brain,' Nath explained.

Nath said he did not discover any signs of COVID-19 in the brain tissue itself, suggesting the damage was not caused by a direct viral attack on the brain, but instead came from the body's inflammatory response to the virus.

'When I sit back sometimes and think about it, I'm just shocked at what this virus does to us,' said Dr. Farha Ikramuddin, a physical medicine rehabilitation physician at M Health Fairview and assistant professor at the University of Minnesota Medical School.

Dr. ikramuddin works firsthand with so-called 'COVID long-haulers,' people who have mysterious, lingering symptoms long after recovering from the virus.

'Anywhere from impaired cognition such as not being able to remember things to absolute hallucinations and delirium to death. I have seen a few patients with what we can fantasmia, which is basically hallucinations of smell, so they smell things that are not there,' Ikramuddin explained. 'Patients do not need to be admitted to the hospital to have significant post-COVID-19 syndrome.'

Ikramuddin believes it is extremely important to keep looking at the brain, in an effort to understand COVID-19 symptoms and outcomes.

The National Institutes of Health recently launched a new Neuro-COVID Project, which will allow doctors across the country to send data and specimens to a central databank/biobank, in the hopes of tracking neurological symptoms associated with the virus:

Researchers Discover Existing Drug That May Treat COVID-19 Debilitating Long-Haul Symptom

https://scitechdaily.com/resea…tating-long-haul-symptom/

In a new study out of University of California San Diego School of Medicine, researchers found a drug used for heart failure improves symptoms associated with postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome, otherwise known as POTS. This complex, debilitating disorder affects the body’s autonomic nervous system, causing a high heart rate, usually when standing.

Writing in the February 15, 2021, online issue of the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, study authors investigated the drug ivabradine and its effects on heart rate, quality of life and plasma norepinephrine levels in persons living with POTS. Norepinephrine is a stress hormone and neurotransmitter. In blood plasma, it is used as a measure of sympathetic nervous system activity. Trial participants experienced a reduction in heart rate, improvement in their symptoms and overall quality of life one month after taking the drug.

“Ivabradine is a novel agent that’s FDA-approved for heart failure, but based on its mechanism we thought it could be helpful for patients with POTS as it reduces heart rate without impacting blood pressure,” said Pam Taub, MD, cardiologist at the Cardiovascular Institute at UC San Diego Health and associate professor of medicine at UC San Diego School of Medicine. “When we can lower the heart rate, we’re providing these patients with the ability to stand up, something they couldn’t do without difficulty before due to their POTS diagnosis.”

The study involved 22 individuals whose average age was 32 years. Each participant had been screened and recruited from cardiology clinics at UC San Diego Health from 2018 to 2020.

The study utilized a randomized, double-blinded, placebo-controlled crossover design in which patients started on either ivabradine or a placebo for one month. At the end of the month, all participants underwent a washout period where neither drug nor placebo was taken for one week. After the washout period, the participants who had previously received ivabradine switched to placebo and vice versa for one month.

Over the course of the two months, patients also met with researchers for seven different clinic visits in which plasma norepinephrine levels were measured and head-up tilt testing conducted to observe the patient’s heart rate when sitting, lying down or standing up.

“Before the study, these patients would be living with elevated heart rates ranging between 100 to 115 beats per minute when standing,” said Taub. “After taking ivabradine twice a day for one month, the standing heart rate decreased significantly to around 77 beats per minute compared to the placebo group. Participants also reported improvement in quality of life measures when on the drug.”

The researchers also noted ivabradine was well-tolerated with no significant side effects while other drugs used to lower heart rate, such as beta blockers, can cause fatigue and decreased blood pressure.

Taub said the study was the first randomized clinical trial using ivabradine to treat POTS.

POTS is typically caused by a viral infection, trauma, surgery, or enforced bedrest, and most commonly affects young women who are either athletes or highly active. Currently, there is no FDA-approved treatment for POTS and the condition can severely impact quality of life. Other symptoms of POTS include “brain fog,” lightheadedness, palpitations, tremors, weakness, blurry vision and fatigue.

Recently, POTS has been identified as a potential “long-hauler” symptom of COVID-19.

“In our contemporary practice, we are seeing patients who have previously been infected with COVID-19 present with symptoms consistent with POTS,” said Jonathan Hsu, MD, cardiologist at UC San Diego Health. “Given the similarities, this study leads to the question whether therapy with ivabradine may help patients who experience similar symptoms after a COVID-19 infection, and provide an important area for future study as well.”

The authors said they hope ivabradine will be considered as a possible treatment option for those with a confirmed diagnosed of POTS. Currently, the drug is not FDA-approved for the disease and when used clinically it would be “off-label” use.

“Similar to patients with COVID-19, patients with POTS need to be followed carefully,” said Taub. “Treatment for POTS needs to be personalized for each individual and with this drug, paired with lifestyle therapy, including exercises specific for POTS, we hope we will see more individuals overcome this unfortunate condition.”

Ivabradine is FDA-approved in the United States for use in patients with symptoms due to stable heart failure and an ejection fraction of 35% or less to reduce their risk of hospital admission for worsening heart failure.[1][2][3]

Patients on ivabradine therapy should have a resting heart rate of at least 70 beats per minute and must be in normal sinus rhythm. They should also be on their maximum tolerated beta blocker or have a contraindication to beta-blocker use.

In Europe, ivabradine is indicated in the treatment of heart failure and chronic stable angina.