Merck Says Its Antiviral Pill Is Effective Against Covid

If authorized, Merck’s drug would be the second antiviral treatment for Covid. The first, remdesivir, must be infused and has lost favor among clinicians after studies suggested that it offers only modest benefit for Covid patients.

Volunteers in Merck’s clinical trial had to be unvaccinated, had to be at high risk of bad outcomes from Covid and had to have begun having symptoms of Covid within the past five days.

The company did not disclose whether, or to what degree, the drug was more or less effective depending on how soon the treatment was given.

“If you see a difference for patients who got treated at, say, Day 2, versus patients who got treated Day 5,” said Dr. Celine Gounder, an infectious disease specialist at Bellevue Hospital Center. “That’s going to imply that there are limitations in terms of impact because you’d need to be able to make the diagnosis in time and get people treated quickly enough.”

Experts also cautioned that the United States did not yet have enough coronavirus testing or sufficient infrastructure for delivering the pills to take full advantage.

Dr. Gounder and other experts said getting the pills to people quickly enough for them to benefit would require more antigen testing, which is conducted at home or in drive-throughs and returns results in 15 minutes. But the tests are hard to come by and quickly sell out when retailers get them in stock. (PCR testing, by contrast, can take days for labs to return a positive result.)

The goal should be for people to begin taking the pills within 24 hours of showing symptoms and testing positive, said Dr. Elizabeth Duke, an infectious disease specialist who ran Merck’s study site at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle. Absent greater use of things like telemedicine, that will be hard, she said.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/01/business/covid-antiviral-pill-merck.html