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
Subscribe to Nature Briefing, an unmissable daily round-up of science news, opinion and analysis free in your inbox every weekday.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
01 January 2020: Our reporters’ top picks of 2019
Nature PastCast, December 1920: The Quantum Theory
Podcast Extra: From climate lawyer to climate activist
Podcast Extra: Epigenetics
19 December 2019: The three-body problem, and festive fun
Long Read Podcast: How to save coral reefs as the world warms
12 December 2019: Social priming, and acoustic science
05 December 2019: Genomic sequencing and the source of solar winds
Nature Pastcast, November 1869: The first issue of Nature
28 November 2019: Nature’s 2019 PhD survey, and older women in sci-fi novels
21 November 2019: A new antibiotic from nematode guts, grant funding ‘lotteries’, and butterfly genomes
14 November 2019: A rapid, multi-material 3D printer, and a bacterium’s role in alcoholic hepatitis
Backchat: Nature's 150th anniversary
07 November 2019: The fossil of an upright ape, science in 150 years, and immunization progress around the world
Nature Pastcast, October 1993: Carl Sagan uses Galileo to search for signs of life
31 October 2019: An AI masters the video game StarCraft II, and measuring arthropod abundance
Podcast Extra: Detecting gravitational waves
24 October 2019: Quantum supremacy and ancient mammals
17 October 2019: Mapping childhood mortality, and evolving ‘de novo’ genes
10 October 2019: Estimating earthquake risk, and difficulties for deep-learning
Create your
podcast in
minutes
It is Free