"We all hope Covid-19 is going to go away, but it's not going away," says Sir Christopher Edwards.
Results show that a drug cocktail is four times better at keeping people out of intensive care than the current treatment.
Sir Christopher Edwards, the former vice-chancellor of the University, conducted trials showing that a combination of spironolactone and dexamethasone works better than dexamethasone alone.
Sir John Bell, professor of medicine at Oxford University, was tasked with finding drugs which could be used to treat coronaviruses, and Dexamethasone became the first drug to be licensed.
He believes that more lives could be saved if spironolactone was included, after early trials showed promising results.
In a trial in Delhi, only a small percentage of hospitilised patients needed to be admitted to intensive care, compared to those taking dexamethasone alone.
40 Covid-19 patients taking the "SpiDex" cocktail did better than 40 patients on a high dose of dexamethasone, according to a study published last week.
There was one death in the dexamethasone-only group.
There were no adverse events and 95 percent of the patients were symptom free after 10 days.
The treatments work by turning off the devastating impact on the body, so it means the drug combination should work against the Nu variant, which is alarming scientists.
Sir Christopher said that all the coronaviruses use the same taxi to get into the cell.
The consequences of the destruction of the taxi include symptoms and complications.
The consequences are not dependent on how the virus gets into the taxi. It is likely to be effective regardless of the Nu variant of the virus.
The drugs work.
The drugs work by shutting down the reaction that allows the virus to escape from cells. It stops the deadly clot and fluid retention in the lungs which can lead to death in Covid-19.
The success of the drugs gives clues about why young and healthy people are largely unaffected by Covid-19.
Younger people have less ability to detect the virus in the lining of the blood vessels, meaning it can't cause problems in the more dangerous parts of the body.
Sir Christopher recommended the treatment to his daughter-in-law when she became seriously ill with Covid-19 and was struggling to breathe. She made a full recovery.
Large trials of dexamethasone reduced deaths by a third for people on ventilators, but the combination could stop large numbers from needing intensive care in the first place.
Sir John Bell was quoted in The Telegraph as saying, "Dexamethasone is great." There are some good arguments for adding spironolactone. It would be great if there was trial data to support it.
The combination of the two drugs is starting to show results.
Sarah Knapton writes that Sir John Bell sent a text message to Sir Christopher Edwards in June 2020.
It was just three words: You were right.
Sir Christopher urged Sir John to consider the steroid dexamethasone when he was first tasked with finding treatments for the new virus.
The first known treatment for Covid-19 was shown to reduce deaths by a third in large trials within months.
Sir Christopher believes that combining the steroid with spironolactone could have made a bigger impact on the epidemic. The combination of the two drugs is starting to show results in trials.
He told The Telegraph that he would have been better off if both drugs had been used.
I have had a lot of sleepless nights thinking about how many people have died that didn't need to. That is upsetting.
It was clear from the beginning that Covid-19 was different from other respiratory infections. Patients were experiencing loss of taste and smell, while post-mortems revealed severe blood clotting and fluid in the lungs of the dead.
The mechanisms behind the strange symptoms and pathologies were the key to understanding how to stop the disease.
We spent too much time trying to stop the virus with drugs. If a thief crashes your car, you don't get the car going again by chasing after the thief.
We spent a lot of time chasing the virus. We haven't spent a lot of time working out what's wrong with the car.
Coronaviruses has small grappling rods on its shell which it uses to grab onto a claw-like receptor on human cells called ACE2. This is used by the virus to get into the cell.
Once inside, it must find a way out so it can spread.
Studies have shown that the coronaviruses can hitch a ride in lysosomes. The sacs move to the cell surface and allow the virus to escape from the cell.
The virus causes cells to lose their moat, which leads to the production of cortisol. Cortisol causes the release of the hijacked lysosomes which carry out the virus.
The important clue in understanding this process was the release of the ATP. When too much is produced in certain places, the body shuts off its protective mechanism and also causes specific nerves to go crazy.
When coronaviruses are released in the lungs, they cause a loss of taste and smell, which is a classic symptom of Covid-19.
Sir Christopher realized that using a combination of the drug dexamethasone to suppress cortisol and spironolactone to block the ACE2 receptor could keep cortisol out.
If you can block this process, you will be able to prevent the basic problem.
Some groups of patients are at a higher risk of dying from Covid-19, according to his work. The cells lining blood vessels are the subject of this.
Sir Christopher suggested that when the virus enters these cells, it causes the Von Willebrand factor to spread out, forming a mesh that collects key cells in the blood, causing local clotting.
It also causes the production of a factor called angiopoietin-2 which prevents fluid from being cleared from the lungs.
There are 10 times as many micro-clots in the lungs of people who die from Covid-19 as there are in the lungs of people who die from influenza.
The body has a very clever system in the air sacs where key cells produce a substance that acts like a very clever plumbing device and the person who seals the leaks is the one who has the most cells.
When the blood vessels are damaged by angiopoietin-2 released from the cells, the plumbing system stops working, and so you drown.
The Von Willebrand Factor and angiopoietin-2 are important for the health of people in intensive care.
Older and sicker people are more vulnerable to the disease because of the mechanism.
Younger people carry the taxi used for cell entry on key cells that line the nose, tongue and respiratory tract, which is why they suffer mild infections.
Covid-19 is rarely serious in younger age groups because the receptor is virtually absent from the cells that line the blood vessels.
Older people and people with conditions such as heart disease and diabetes carry many ACE2 receptors, which makes coronaviruses an easy ride into dangerous parts of the body.
Spironolactone is a second crucial backstop because it is synergistic with dexamethasone and they produce a much greater benefit.
This dual approach could prevent deaths and serious illness, but it could also be used as a spray to stop the spread of Viruses.
The benefits could be extraordinary if we can reproduce on a larger scale what these early trials suggest.
Covid-19 is not going away, but we hope it does. Spironolactone and dexamethasone are cheap off-patent drugs that could be immediately available for parts of the world that can't afford expensive anti-viral drugs.
I think we all need to wake up, if you look at the number of cases we have. You have to have a vaccine resistance variant and you are back to square one. We have to act now.
The scientific world may be starting to come around to his point of view.
