When we talk about the fight against COVID we think of vaccines, but there is a group of scientists who claim to be able to have a pill ready to treat it much more easily.
This is reported on NBC, where researchers show how they are developing a pill that could treat COVID-19 by limiting transmission to other people.
According to this medium, clinical trials are being carried out with three antiviral treatments. Treatment would be a regimen of daily oral pills that fight COVID early after diagnosis. Its use would be similar to the antivirals used to combat hepatitis C, HIV and influenza infections, being capable of interrupting the ability of the virus to replicate in the human body.
So far only one antiviral drug, remdesivir, has been approved to treat Covid. But it is given intravenously to patients sick enough to be hospitalized and is not intended for early and widespread use.
Carl Diefenbach, director of the AIDS division at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, believes that over the next several weeks they will already have definitive results to know what these COVID pills are capable of.
Oral treatment for COVID are from three companies: Merck & Co. and Ridgeback Biotherapeutics, Pfizer and Roche, and Atea Pharmaceuticals.
If the results are positive, it will be granted an emergency use and it will be distributed quickly.
The biggest problem is finding volunteers to take the pill, as each trial requires hundreds of participants within five days of testing positive for COVID. Patients must also not be vaccinated, and it is not easy to find people who meet these conditions and are willing to participate in trials.
Dr. Elizabeth Duke, a researcher supervising one of the trials, says there is currently a lot of distrust of the scientific process, but still testing is on track to finish before the end of the year.
