COVID pill

This week I came across an article about a COVID anti-viral pill. There's some hope that an antiviral (similar to the well-known Tamiflu) could work that would be used to treat people with COVID. The action of the pill would work to reduce the viral load.

The price of COVID treatments is high. The article mentions monoclonal antibody treatments costing USD $2,000 per dose. Hopefully, pill treatments, which are likely to be easier to administer, would be cheaper.

The article makes an interesting point about testing the drug though. As we're seeing, unvaccinated people are the most likely to be hospitalised by COVID.

One challenge in developing antiviral drugs quickly has been recruiting enough participants for the clinical trials, each of which needs to enroll many hundreds of people, said Dr. Elizabeth Duke, a Fred Hutch research associate overseeing its molnupiravir trial [the antiviral pill discussed above] .

Participants must be unvaccinated and enrolled in the trial within five days of a positive COVID test. Any given day, interns make 100 calls to newly COVID-positive people in the Seattle area — and most say no.

“Just generally speaking, there's a lot of mistrust about the scientific process,” Duke said. “And some of the people are saying kind of nasty things to the interns.”

Of course, it's better to prevent COVID with vaccination rather than relying on treatments in hospital. I think a tweet from Debunk the funk is relevant:

Anti-vaxxers and wellness types are always on about prevention. You'd think they'd embrace vaccination!