A Much-Hyped COVID-19 Treatment Has a Weird Connection to Black-Market Cat Drugs
An antiviral almost identical to remdesivir is widely available in China’s underground marketplaces-as a game-changing treatment for a different coronavirus in cats
By Sarah Zhang
When Robin Kintz’s two kittens, Fiona and Henry, contracted a fatal cat disease last year, she began hearing of a black-market drug from China. The use of the drug, known as GS-441524, is based on legitimate research from UC Davis, but the ways to get it seemed much less so. “It was, ‘If you want to save your cat, send me thousands of dollars, and I’ll DHL you some unmarked vials,’” she says. And she did. Kintz transferred the thousands of dollars, got the unmarked vials from China, and then injected the clear liquid into her dying cats every day for months.
The first remarkable thing, given the nature of the transaction, is that Kintz says the vials actually worked. Henry lived for almost another year, and Fiona made a full recovery. She’s still scampering around today, fluffy and alive — a miracle considering that vets had long thought her disease, feline infectious peritonitis, to be incurable and 100 percent fatal. Kintz now runs a 22,000-member Facebook group that helps…
