CARACAS (Reuters) – Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro is promoting a “miraculous” drug that he said neutralizes COVID-19 without side effects, a claim that doctors said was not supported by science.
Maduro on Sunday presented the drug Carvativir, an oral solution he said was tested on patients at a hospital in Caracas and a sports center used as an emergency medical center.
“It went through a period of nine months of study, experimentation, clinical application. About the sick, about the very sick, about the people who were intubated and we recovered them, ”he said, during a television broadcast on Sunday.
He described the liquid as “miracle drops by Jose Gregorio Hernandez”, a 19th-century Venezuelan doctor who was beatified by the Roman Catholic Church last year, without going into details about the active ingredients.
The information ministry did not respond to a request for additional information.
In response, doctors said Carvativir is derived from thyme, an herb used for centuries in traditional medicine, but whose effect on coronavirus has not been established.
“The claim for treatment of the #Carvativir brand for # COVID19 has no basis in any clinical data, but as a #Maduro press release, it can hit the waves of social media for another wave of bread and sublingual circus,” he tweeted. Dr. Francisco Marty, an infectious disease specialist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.
The Venezuelan National Academy of Medicine, in a statement late on Monday, said that Carvativir “has therapeutic potential against the coronavirus”.
“However, it is prudent to wait for more data from Carvativir’s tests … to consider it a candidate for an anti-COVID-19 drug,” says the statement.
Venezuela is struggling to gain access to vaccines amid a global rush by countries to inoculate their populations.
He officially reported about 123,709 cases of COVID-19 and 1,148 deaths – data from the opposition and some health professionals say they 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, written by Luc Cohen, edited by Cynthia Osterman and Nick Zieminski)