Merck’s New Antiviral Promises to Make Covid Less Deadly
It should also be relatively easy to scale up manufacturing and get pills out to the people who need them worldwide.
Pills are easier to make than vaccines.
Photographer: Martin Leissl/BloombergMerck & Co. and Ridgeback’s antiviral pill molnupiravir is a potential pandemic game-changer, judging from the positive test data that arrived Friday. To make the most of this promise, governments and global health organizations need to prepare to manufacture the pills in great quantities.
The clinical trial results are preliminary, but impressive. People with fresh symptoms of Covid-19 who took the pills for five days were about half as likely as those on placebo to be hospitalized or die. The difference was so stark — eight who took a placebo died while none who got the pill did — that independent monitors stopped the trial early.