The drug everyone is talking about

A federal trial suggests it might help people recover from the coronavirus a lot faster. But a study found it had no benefit for severely ill patients. The F.D.A. is likely to authorize its emergency use, an administration official told The New York Times.

All that news came on Wednesday about an experimental antiviral drug called remdesivir (pronounced rem-DESS-ih-veer).

Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, is optimistic about the drug, which was originally developed in the hope that it might be useful against the Ebola virus (it wasn’t).

In the federal trial, conducted by his organization, Dr. Fauci said remdesivir appeared to speed up recovery from Covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, by about 31 percent compared with a placebo. While that “doesn’t seem like a knockout,” he said, “what it has proven is that a drug can block this virus.”