Dismay as the UK government cuts funding for the world-famous Covid programme
It transformed the treatment of Covid-19 patients around the world, saving thousands of lives by finding cheap, effective drugs during the pandemic, and earning Britain widespread praise from international groups of scientists.
But now government support for the UK recovery program is coming to an end. In a few weeks, central funding for the program will stop. The program can only continue thanks to funding from a group of US-based philanthropists.
The move has stunned senior scientists, who say it is yet another worrying example of the UK life sciences sector being short-changed by the government. “We knew Recovery had huge potential and that was realized in a very short space of time during Covid. But now that dream is not being realized,” says Prof. Peter Horby, one of the co-founders of Recovery.
And it’s not just the value of recovery that has been ignored now that the pandemic is over, Horby added. “Britain has done some of the world’s best clinical research, vaccine development and genomics work, but much of it has simply been thrown away or deprived of investment. Yet we urgently need to be alert to the dangers of future pandemics.”
Recovery – the Randomized Evaluation of Covid-19 Therapy – is a drug testing program that, at the height of the pandemic, involved thousands of doctors and nurses working with tens of thousands of Covid-19 patients in hospitals across Britain . Trials were conducted in intensive care units and in wards full of critically ill patients.
“In everyday routine clinical medicine, it is crucial to sort out the difference between what you think might work, what actually works – and what doesn’t,” says Prof. Martin Landray, Recovery’s other co-founder. “Recovery did just that.”
The program managed to identify four effective drugs, while convincingly showing that eight overhyped drugs were not. For example, it turned out that the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine – widely touted by Donald Trump as a Covid-19 treatment – does not help patients. In contrast, dexamethasone, a cheap treatment for inflammation and arthritis, was found to reduce deaths among intensive care patients by a third. No other country came even close to these achievements.
“Other countries, including Canada and the US, have made it clear that they are extremely jealous of what Britain has done with Recovery and are preparing to spend significant sums setting up similar programs – at a time when we are collectively seem to lose interest in the program. And I think that’s a shame,” said Landray.
Britain’s recovery will survive thanks to Flu Lab, a US philanthropic organization committed to fighting future flu epidemics, with the program expanded under the new deal to research new treatments for flu and Covid.
The UK government’s decision not to continue supporting Recovery comes against a worrying backdrop, which has left Britain falling badly behind other countries in carrying out clinical trials, where new drugs are tested on volunteers to ensure that they are safe and working, and to ensure that they are safe and working. monitor any side effects. For example, the Swiss company Novartis recently canceled a major trial of a cholesterol drug in Britain.
“We have fallen down the rankings when it comes to doing tests, so that we are now below Italy, Poland, France and many other countries. The state of the NHS is part of the problem but is worrying nonetheless,” said Horby.
“I welcome the government’s ambition for Britain to become a scientific superpower, but if you look at what is happening today we appear to be going in the wrong direction.”
This point was supported by Landray, who warned that it was crucial that Britain was prepared for the arrival of future pandemics. “You don’t prepare for the next war by disbanding the army just because it’s peacetime,” he told the Observer.