America Needs a New Scientific Revolution

Two stories in science are worth cheering right now: the amazing amount of knowledge humanity is gathering about COVID-19 and the quietly revolutionary ways we’re accelerating the pace of discovery.

First, the knowledge: Last week, a large clinical trial concluded that the cheap antidepressant drug fluvoxamine dramatically lowers the chance that people with COVID-19 will get hospitalized or die.

Researchers found that patients who took the drug for at least eight days saw a 91 percent reduction in death rate. Fluvoxamine, which has been used for decades to treat depression and obsessive-compulsive disorder, also reduces inflammation, which alerted scientists to its potential to calm the immune-system storms caused by COVID-19. “This is exciting data,” Daniel Griffin, the chief of infectious disease at the health-care-provider network ProHealth New York, . “This may end up being standard of care.”