Researchers Worry COVID Will Quickly Develop Resistance To New Pills From Pfizer And Merck

If it wasn’t already bad enough that several experts have warned that US regulators are overlooking safety risks associated with the new generation of COVID therapeutic pills from Pfizer and Merck, researchers and regulators are also apparently worried that they might not even work – at least, not for long.

According to a report in WSJ, researchers and academics are already taking steps to keep an eye out for signs that COVID is evolving in response to exposure to pills like Paxlovid and Molnupiravir.

The hope is that the pills will save more lives, especially now that the vaccines and boosters have been surprisingly ineffective at prevent transmission and infection with the virus.

“We know this is likely to happen at some point, so we need to beat it to the punch and nip it in the bud before it gets out of hand and starts to take over,” said Katherine Seley-Radtke, a medicinal-chemistry professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, whose lab is studying antiviral combination therapies.

The manufacturers of the pills say that the length of a course – which is taken over just five days, too short for the virus to develop immunity, they say. Then again, nobody knows for sure.

Some believe what we know about how other viruses react to drugs might offer some insights: for example, HIV is more likely to develop a resistance to treatments consisting of a single drug, hence the use of cocktails. But HIV is a chronic disease, not an acute infection like COVID. – READ MORE