It's Merck and Molnupiravir.
It's also not that effective.
Quote:
The results, released ahead of the advisory committee meeting, showed that the antiviral, which was developed by the pharmaceutical firm Merck, based in Kenilworth, New Jersey, and the biotechnology company Ridgeback Biotherapeutics in Miami, Florida, decreased the risk of hospitalization from COVID-19 by 30% — down from a 50% reduction observed early in the trial. “That’s not all that good,” says Katherine Seley-Radtke, a medicinal chemist who develops antiviral drugs at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. “It’s pretty lacklustre.” Eliav Barr, the senior vice-president of global medical and scientific affairs at Merck, says that a reduction in hospitalizations would still be beneficial, especially in areas that are experiencing a surge in infections.
Monoclonal antibody treatments, by contrast, reduce the risk of severe COVID-19 by up to 85%.
...
Merck’s initial study group included 762 people who received 4 pills of either the antiviral or a placebo twice a day, for 5 consecutive days, between May and early August. A second group included 646 people who received the same treatment between August and early October. All of the participants, nearly 80% of whom were located in Europe or Latin America, started the regimen within 5 days of experiencing COVID-19 symptoms. For each group, researchers tracked the participants and measured how many ended up in hospital or died because of COVID-19 complications. In the first group, participants’ rate of hospitalization or death dropped by half if they took molnupiravir rather than a placebo. But in the second group, there was almost no difference in outcome for those on the antiviral compared with those on the placebo.
Nicholas Kartsonis, the senior vice-president of clinical research at Merck, told the FDA advisory committee on 30 November that the company couldn’t explain the starkly different results, which have not been peer reviewed. Some of the committee members pointed out that the highly transmissible Delta variant of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus had not yet become dominant globally during the first half of the trial, whereas it had by the second half. This might mean that molnupiravir isn’t as effective against Delta as it is against some other variants.
And while you're busy complaining about them "taking forever to approve anything," they're worried about the largely unknown side effects... one of which could be literally creating a stronger strain of COVID.
Quote:
Intentionally introducing mutations into viral RNA might create a more dangerous version of SARS-CoV-2, critics say. In such a scenario, mutations could occur in the virus’s spike protein, which it uses to gain entry to human cells, making the virus more transmissible or able to evade vaccines. That will mainly be a concern, says Swaminathan, who voted against authorizing molnupiravir, if people don’t finish the full 5-day, 40-pill course of treatment, because some of the mutated virus might survive in a person’s body and then be transmitted to others.
But they're kind of damned if they do and damned if they don't here, aren't they? People say the vaccine was rushed and so they won't get it, and you're upset that this
wasn't rushed despite the lower than expected efficacy and potential side effects.
