Can Drugs Be Used for Prophylaxis?

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There will be interest in studying these drugs as well for prophylaxis. So if you've been exposed to someone who has covid and want to guard against an infection, it may be that eventually these drugs would be considered for treatment there. These are the kinds of things that get public health experts quite excited about this. Any we need to learn more about the anti viral so we'll need to learn how do they impact transmission.

Two new anti-viral pills have been shown to be safe and effective against COVID in clinical trials, according to recent press releases. The drugs, molnupiravir, developed by Merck and Ridgeback Biotherapeutics, and Paxlovid, developed by Pfizer both appear to significantly reduce hospitalisation in people with early COVID. Some researchers are quietly hopeful that these new weapons in the anti-COVID arsenal could have a big impact, in particular in parts of the world where vaccines are still not widely available, but there are a number of caveats. In this episode of Coronapod, we open the pill boxes and pick through the contents - asking how the drugs work, what side effects we might see and how, if at all, they might change the course of the pandemic.

News: COVID antiviral pills: what scientists still want to know

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