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Medical Dispatch

How Will the COVID Pills Change the Pandemic?

New antiviral drugs are startlingly effective against the
coronavirus--if they're taken in time.

By Dhruv Khullar

November 21, 2021

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Illustration of an hourglass inside of a pill. The sand in the
hourglass is made of coronaviruses.
Illustration by Nicholas Konrad / The New Yorker

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In March, 2020, researchers at Emory University published a paper
about a molecule called NHC/EIDD-2801. At the time, there were no
treatments available for the coronavirus. But NHC/EIDD-2801, the
researchers wrote, possessed "potency against multiple
coronaviruses," and could become "an effective antiviral against
SARS-CoV-2." A few days later, Emory licensed the molecule to
Ridgeback Biotherapeutics, a Miami-based biotechnology company which
had previously developed a monoclonal antibody for Ebola. Ridgeback
partnered with the pharmaceutical giant Merck to accelerate its
development.

The Emory researchers named their drug molnupiravir, after
Mjolnir--the hammer of Thor. It turns out that this was not hyperbole.
Last month, Merck and Ridgeback announced that molnupiravir could
reduce by half the chances that a person infected by the coronavirus
would need to be hospitalized. The drug was so overwhelmingly
effective that an independent committee asked the researchers to stop
their Phase III trial early--it would have been unethical to continue
giving participants placebos. None of the nearly four hundred
patients who received molnupiravir in the trial went on to die, and
the drug had no major side effects. On November 4th, the U.K. became
the first country to approve molnupiravir; many observers expect that
an emergency-use authorization will come from the U.S. Food and Drug
Administration in December.

[dhruv_khul]
Dhruv Khullar, a contributing writer at The New Yorker, is a
practicing physician and an assistant professor at Weill Cornell
Medical College.
More:CoronavirusPandemicsMedicineMerckPfizer

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