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When Christina Brennan initially planned a clinical trial to test the use of famotidine for treating mild COVID-19, she wrote a protocol that involved participants occasionally coming in for lab work at an internal medicine clinic. Enrollment in trials run by Brennan and her colleagues on hospitalized COVID-19 patients was waning following last spring’s surge, so she’d shifted her focus to studying COVID-19 patients who were fighting the disease at home. But in speaking with the clinic’s doctors last summer, she learned that patients who had tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 would not be allowed in the clinic of the nonprofit provider Northwell Health, New York’s largest healthcare system.
“This gave us pause,” says Brennan, the vice president of clinical research at Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research, Northwell’s research arm. After hearing stories from patients who had experienced COVID-19 and told her how exhausting the illness was, ...
