What’s the Evidence for Fluvoxamine in COVID-19?

The US FDA’s decision not to grant an emergency use authorization for the antidepressant as a COVID-19 treatment highlights a lack of consensus among researchers about how to interpret clinical data on the drug.

Written byCatherine Offord

| 7 min read

Open orange pill bottle with rounded white pills

Image credit:© iStock.com, AndrewSoundarajan

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Update (August 19): Results of the COVID-OUT trial—which evaluated fluvoxamine, metformin, and ivermectin—were published yesterday in The New England Journal of Medicine. “None of the three medications that were evaluated prevented the occurrence of hypoxemia, an emergency department visit, hospitalization, or death associated with Covid-19,” the authors write in their paper.

Fluvoxamine is a type of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor currently approved by the US Food and Drug Administration as a treatment for obsessive compulsive disorder, although it is also prescribed for depression. An off-patent drug, fluvoxamine is cheap and widely available, making it potentially attractive as a repurposed COVID-19 treatment—if it can be shown to be effective.

The drug drew splashy headlines last October, when a study reported that it lowered hospitalization risk among COVID-19 outpatients. But debate on this and other fluvoxamine data has been swirling for some months now.

Currently, National Institutes of Health (NIH) guidelines state ...

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Meet the Author

Catherine Offord
After undergraduate research with spiders at the University of Oxford and graduate research with ants at Princeton University, Catherine left arthropods and academia to become a science journalist. She has worked in various guises at The Scientist since 2016. As Senior Editor, she wrote articles for the online and print publications, and edited the magazine’s Notebook, Careers, and Bio Business sections. She reports on subjects ranging from cellular and molecular biology to research misconduct and science policy. Find more of her work at her website.
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