PUTRAJAYA (Oct 19): Antivirus medicines such as remdesivir have been found to be ineffective in treating Covid-19 patients as well as not helpful in reducing death cases of the outbreak.

Health director-general Tan Sri Dr Noor Hisham Abdullah said clinical studies by the World Health Organization (WHO) Solidarity trial proved that anti-malaria medicine hydroxychloroquine as well as lopinavir and ritonavir are not effective in treating the disease.

"So we could conclude that remdesivir is not effective for us to treat Covid-19 patients in three aspects, namely death, admission to hospital, and need for ventilator.

"Earlier we had no strong evidence, but today we have conducted studies not only in Malaysia but also involving countries under WHO," he told a media conference about the latest Covid-19 developments today.

Earlier, all the medicines (remdesivir, hydroxychloroquine, lopinavir, and ritonavir) were used to treat Covid-19 patients.

However, Noor Hisham said antivirus medicine dexamethasone, which could prevent pneumonia, has been found effective and produces positive results on the patients' health.

He said the clinical study involved Covid-19 patients from 30 countries including Malaysia.

On the procurement of vaccine, Noor Hisham said MOH needs to look at the data on the effectiveness of the vaccine as well as study on its side effects before recommending its application for Malaysians.

"We need to see the effectiveness of vaccine and its complications if they are high... we have an issue to use the vaccine as safety is very important to MOH," he said.

Commenting on the involvement of Malaysia in Covid-19 Vaccine Global Access (COVAX) in developing the vaccine, Noor Hisham said MOH agreed to be in the group as Malaysia could discuss with the companies and countries to procure a vaccine.

Via COVAX, he said Malaysia is free to hold discussions with the countries or the companies producing vaccines.

"Apart from that, several issues should be studied in obtaining the vaccine such as why the price is already fixed when it is still not ready. MOH needs to take the responsibility and not the manufacturing company of the vaccine," he said and added that the issue should be further looked into.