Who Will Take Merck’s New Covid-19 Pills?
The antivirals may be approved before year’s end. But healthy people under 65 may not get them.
It will take a Covid test to get the Covid pills.
Photographer: Chip Somodevilla/Getty ImagesA new pill to treat people with Covid-19 may be given emergency use authorization by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration before year’s end. The data from a late-stage clinical trial suggest that the drug, molnupiravir, can protect patients who are treated within the first five days of feeling symptoms — lowering their risk of hospitalization and death by half. But who will get them and how will they work? In this Q&A, Max Nisen and Sam Fazeli, who cover health care and the pharmaceutical industry for Bloomberg Opinion and Bloomberg Intelligence, discuss the first Covid-19 oral antivirals.
MN: Who should get this treatment? Anyone who gets Covid, just the unvaccinated, or only people at higher risk of bad outcomes?