What Merck’s antiviral pill could mean for vaccine hesitancy — ‘It’s not a magic pill’
Merck and Ridgeback Therapeutics Inc.’s experimental oral antiviral treatment is being heralded as a pill with major upside potential in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We are seeing this happen already with monoclonal antibody treatments,” he said. The treatments, administered intravenously and subcutaneously, in some instances, are meant for people with mild to moderate COVID-19 cases who are at high risk for severe disease. The fact that those treatments exist may have given some people who are vaccine hesitant the idea that they don’t necessarily need the vaccine, he said.
“The extraordinary impact of this pandemic demands that we move with unprecedented urgency, and that is what our teams have done by submitting this application for molnupiravir to the FDA within 10 days of receiving the data,” Robert M. Davis, Merck’s CEO and president, said Monday in a statement. Just over 20% of America’s adult population still has not received one dose of the vaccine, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. As of Saturday, 78.2% of the country’s adult population had received at least one shot.
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