We Need A Pill To Fight Covid. There Could Be One This Year

The virus will harass us for years. An antiviral pill that patients can take at home will ease the burden on hospitals and reduce deaths

- Abhilash Gaur

Here we are falling over each other to get vaccinated while 117 workers of a US hospital have gone to court against compulsory vaccination. Yes, there are people — possibly many millions — who won’t take a vaccine. Millions of others can’t because of medical reasons. A few billion people in poor countries will need to wait until vaccine supplies increase in 2022 or 2023. Meanwhile, some vaccinated people will keep getting Covid because vaccines are not 100% protective.

In short, we will be dealing with Covid next year, and the year after that, and for years more. What could help us beat it — more hospitals, ventilators, steroids, monoclonal antibodies? All of those, of course, but also an antiviral pill that patients can safely take at home to stop the disease. It will blunt any future Covid wave. Even if thousands fall sick, most will recover at home.

Why not yesterday?

If vaccines could be made in a few months, why isn’t the Covid pill here already? Making antivirals is hard, which is why we have so few of them, Damian Garde writes in Stat.

In theory, you should be able to attack a virus before it invades your cells. Say, just after someone has sneezed at you. But this is very difficult because each virus is encased in an “extraordinarily robust” shell, an article in The Conversation says. “Only when the virus reaches its target does its shell decompose or eject its contents, which contain its genetic information.”