https://www.wired.com/story/early-remdesivir-data-for-covid-19-is-finally-here/

In late January and early February, as the novel coronavirus that causes Covid-19 began to spread outside of China, Andre Kalil was spending more and more time inside his office at the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha on the phone and emailing with researchers at the National Institutes of Health. With no known treatments or vaccines against the deadly respiratory virus, the NIH was keen to launch a clinical trial of the most promising candidates, starting with remdesivir, a medicine developed by US-based drugmaker Gilead to treat Ebola. They wanted Kalil to lead that trial.

An infectious disease physician, he was a natural choice for two reasons. One, he’d worked on an unusual trial of Ebola treatments during the 2014-15 West African outbreak that created a new model for evaluating experimental drugs during a public health crisis. And two, he had access to UNMC’s Biocontainment Unit, the largest of 10 nationally-designated centers for treating people with the world’s most infectious deadly diseases. Though the US only had a handful of Covid-19 patients at that time, sooner or later there would be more, and Kalil knew they’d probably wind up in Omaha. “We’re one of the few centers in the country that can receive US patients from other countries during an outbreak, so we viewed it as just a matter of time,” he told WIRED in a recent interview.