An Impressive New Anti-COVID Tool: Enovid

It looks like COVID is here to stay, e.g. it’s endemic. So now what? How do we think intelligently and practically about COVID being an ongoing part of our lives, particularly with the holidays and winter rapidly approaching?

At GetzWell we are always exploring evidenced based ways to keep our families, staff and community healthy. Adequate sleep, eating the rainbow, and keeping stress levels low are foundations for a strong immune system and, with respect to COVID, vaccines/boosters have proven to provide the greatest protection against severe illness and hospitalization.

However, we still have the issue of infection and spread, which the current vaccines are far from perfect at preventing. It’s now clear that COVID and other respiratory viruses enter the body via our noses and until we have better mucosal immunity in the nose and upper respiratory tract (which might be stimulated by a nasal vaccine) to control infection and spread of COVID, we will continue to struggle as a society under the weight of symptomatic infections, long COVID, as yet unknown long term health effects, and high excess death rates compared to pre-COVID times. Since mucosal immunity is more complex to stimulate compared to serum IgG antibodies produced by intramuscular vaccines, we don’t know when, or if, nasal vaccines will be successfully developed for human use.

In the meantime, what if we told you there is a nasal spray with promising preliminary data showing dramatic reduction of COVID viral load at the point of entry into the body, i.e. the nose? This new product, Enovid, has been tested in humans and study results were published in the Lancet in July of this year.

SaNOtize, a global company based in Vancouver, Canada, has formulated a nitric oxide nasal spray which underwent phase 3 clinical trials in for the treatment of COVID. In their double-blind placebo-controlled study they showed SARS-CoV2 viral load was reduced by 94% within 24 hours of treatment, and 98% within 48 hours of treatment. That is impressive! (Nitric oxide is something our bodies naturally produce but in therapeutic doses can act as an antimicrobial agent. Here is a short video showing how nitric oxide does its magic to inhibit viral entry into our cells and disable viral replication.)

They also looked at the use of this nasal spray in prevention of COVID infection after exposure. Retrospectively, those using Enovid were 75% less likely to become infected following high risk exposure when compared to the control group during the original Omicron wave.

Thus far, all studies have been conducted in adults and they have not seen any side effects aside from brief nasal discomfort in a small number of subjects. They recommend it for those 12 years and older.

We think this is exciting and wanted to share the news with you! It can be purchased here and takes about 3-4 days to arrive. For convenience, we have a small stock of Enovid in our offices since it isn’t readily or widely available in the US because of pending FDA approval.