No antiviral drug has ever been approved to treat a coronavirus
The old claim turned out to be wrong and was rejected by evidence.
TaughtAntibiotics do nothing against viruses, and for most viral infections there is no cure at all; you treat the symptoms and wait. Coronaviruses in particular have never had a single approved drug to fight them.
NowOn 22 October 2020 the FDA fully approved Veklury (remdesivir) for treating COVID-19, the first drug ever approved to treat any coronavirus infection. It is an antiviral that jams the machinery the virus uses to copy its own genome.
What actually happened
Remdesivir was originally shelved as a failed Ebola drug before being pulled back off the bench for COVID-19. The trial that earned its approval (ACTT-1, in the New England Journal of Medicine) showed it shortened recovery time in hospitalized patients by several days.
The honest hedge matters here: the benefit is real but modest. The World Health Organization's much larger SOLIDARITY trial found little or no effect on survival, and remdesivir was never the dramatic cure the early headlines wanted; better COVID antivirals like Paxlovid arrived later.
What changed in October 2020 is narrow and true all the same: the flat statement that no drug is approved to treat a coronavirus stopped being a fact.
Newsletter
Get new weekly revisions
Sources
Who was taught this
Still standard through 2020, so anyone who finished school between 1950 and 2020 learned the earlier version.