Feb. 18, 2020 -- COVID-19, the infection caused by the newly identified coronavirus, is a currently a disease with no pharmaceutical weapons against it. There’s no vaccine to prevent it, and no drugs can treat it.

But researchers are racing to change that. A vaccine could be ready to test as soon as April.

More than two dozen studies have already been registered on ClinicalTrials.gov, a website that tracks research. These studies aim to test everything from traditional Chinese medicine to vitamin C, stem cells, steroids, and medications that fight other viruses, like the flu and HIV. The hope is that something about how these repurposed remedies work will help patients who are desperately ill with no other prospects.

Flu and HIV drug cocktail may help fight #coronavirus, Thai researchers suggest. https://t.co/Is1wlF5IHcpic.twitter.com/4VRhojlits — Medscape Pharmacists (@MedscapePharm) February 18, 2020

Anthony Fauci, MD, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, says this is all part of the playbook for brand-new diseases.

“There’s a lot of empiric guessing,” he says.

“They’re going to propose a whole lot of drugs that already exist. They’re going to say, here’s the data that shows it blocks the virus” in a test tube.

But test tubes aren’t people, and many drugs that seem to work in a lab won’t end up helping patients.

Coronaviruses are especially hard to stop once they invade the body. Unlike many other kinds of viruses, they have a fail-safe against tampering -- a “proofreader” that constantly inspects their code, looking for errors, including the potentially life-saving errors that drugs could introduce.

Fauci says researchers will be able to make better guesses about how to help people when they can try drugs in animals.

“We don’t have an animal model yet of the new coronavirus. When we do get an animal model, that will be a big boon to drugs because then, you can clearly test them in a physiological way, whether they work,” he says.