stereomatch | 9 points
Merck’s Little Brown Pill Could Transform the Fight Against Covid (Mar 25, 2021) - no shortage of enthusiasm for unproven non-generic drug Molnupiravirhttps://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-03-25/merck-mrk-molnupiravir-pill-could-change-the-fight-against-covid Merck’s Little Brown Pill Could Transform the Fight Against Covid
The antiviral drug molnupiravir, still in clinical trials, would give doctors an important new treatment and a weapon against coronaviruses and future pandemics
By Cynthia Koons and Riley Griffin
The next month, Merck & Co., which has a deep history of public-health development work, including on HIV and Ebola (NOTE: and for river blindness with ivermectin), struck a deal to buy rights to molnupiravir from Ridgeback and start the types of large-scale trials that could get it authorized by regulators. Those began in the fall. Even as vaccines are rolling out worldwide, the coronavirus and its mutations still pose a major health threat. Not everyone who’s eligible for a shot will agree to get one. The hundreds of thousands of people who continue to contract Covid each day have few treatment options. There’s no simple, inexpensive pill that can prevent those at the earliest stages of infection from later needing to be hospitalized. The monoclonal antibody therapies that doctors now have available for those most at risk of getting severely ill need to be administered by infusions at specialized medical centers. And for those who do become hospitalized, the antiviral remdesivir (NOTE: also via intravenous), from Gilead Sciences Inc., speeds recovery (NOTE: only if administered early which it rarely is, given it is an intravenous drug delivered at hospital), but hasn’t been shown to reduce deaths. The chemical compound on which molnupiravir is based—C9H13N3O6, or N4-hydroxycytidine—has been known for decades. Like idoxuridine, the herpes drug, it’s a nucleoside analogue. It interferes in replication, preventing a threat from causing severe infection. Molnupiravir doesn’t stop the virus from replicating, though; instead, the drug introduces errors into the virus’s RNA that are then replicated until it’s defunct.
What are the dangers of acting as a booster for variants. If variants are created at a faster rate, and only the viable ones survive, you may be creating a factory for creating mutants in much larger numbers.
Unless of course the virus fails to reach high viral load and is eliminated quickly by the immune system.
But these explanations maybe failing to understand the viral timeline - according to MATH+ protocol the virus is nearly dead for most people by day 8.
This fact is not highlighted anywhere except in MATH+ protocol and in some papers by others. Most now agree the virus is dead by day 8 - the issue is viral debris is high and causes a hyper-immune reaction.
https://twitter.com/jaysanchezdorta/status/1375982786927034371?s=19
“Merck (MRK) Molnupiravir Pill Could Change the Fight Against Covid - Bloomberg” (as long as, as the article itself admits, you don’t use it too long or too often, because it is a DNA mutagen!). These guys are crazy. I’ll stick with Ivermectin .