CARACAS (Reuters) – Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro is promoting a ‘miracle’ drug that he says neutralizes COVID-19 without any side effects. According to doctors, it is not supported by science.
Maduro on Sunday offered the drug Carvativir, an oral solution he said was being tested on patients in a Caracas hospital and a sports center used as emergency medical services.
“It went through a period of nine months of study, experimentation, clinical application. About sick, very sick, people intubating, and we found them back,” he said on Sunday during a television broadcast.
He described the liquid as ‘miracle drops by Jose Gregorio Hernandez’, a 19th-century Venezuelan doctor who was reconciled by the Roman Catholic Church last year, without elaborating on the active ingredients.
The Ministry of Information did not respond to a request for further information.
In response, doctors said Carvativir was derived from thyme, an herb that has been used in traditional medicine for centuries but whose effect on the coronavirus has not yet been determined.
“The treatment claim for # Carvativir’s brand name for # COVID19 is unfounded by any clinical data, but as a press release from #Maduro, it could hit social media waves for another highlight of sublingual bread and circus,” said Dr. Francisco Marty tweeted, an expert on infectious diseases at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.
Venezuela’s National Academy of Medicine said in a statement late Monday that Carvativir “has therapeutic potential against coronavirus.”
“It is nevertheless prudent to wait for more data from the Carvativir tests … to consider it a candidate for an anti-COVID-19 medication,” the statement read.
Venezuela is scrambling to gain access to vaccines amid a worldwide race by countries to vaccinate their population.
About 123,709 COVID-19 cases and 1,148 deaths have been officially reported – this is according to the opposition and some health workers underestimate the impact of the virus in the South American country, whose health system has deteriorated.
Maduro promised that about 10 million doses of the Russian Sputnik V coronavirus vaccine would arrive soon.
(Reporting by Corina Pons, Brian Ellsworth and Vivian Sequera, writing by Luc Cohen, Editing by Cynthia Osterman and Nick Zieminski)