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The Food and Drug Administration approved remdesivir to treat COVID-19 in hospitalized patients. It’s the first approved COVID-19 treatment in the United States.
Remdesivir, now marketed under the brand name Veklury, was authorized for emergency use by the FDA in May. That emergency authorization indicated that the FDA thought the benefits of using the drug outweighed the risks, even though there was no clear evidence showing that it helped patients with COVID-19 at the time.
The drug works by preventing viruses from making copies of themselves. It was first developed by the pharmaceutical company Gilead to treat Ebola, and research over the past few years showed that it could block the coronaviruses SARS and MERS from replicating…