Follow the Data Podcast

67. A Promising Treatment for COVID-19

Episode Summary

Dr. Arturo Casadevall and colleagues at Johns Hopkins University and around the country have been working around the clock to develop a convalescent serum therapy to treat COVID-19 using blood plasma from recovered patients. If all goes well with the current U.S. trials, thousands of survivors might soon line up to donate their antibody-rich plasma. In this episode of our series around Bloomberg Philanthropies’ COVID-19 response, Dr. Casadavall joined Dr. Jessica Leighton, from our public health team, to discuss how blood plasma has been used to treat infectious disease outbreaks in the past, what makes blood plasma treatment different from a vaccine, how donating your blood plasma could help your community, and what’s giving researchers hope right now.