COVID-19 Pill Being Tested May Be ‘Holy Grail’ Of Pandemic
There is a new medication that could treat coronavirus-positive patients in the works that could be a game-changer, Fox News medical contributor Dr. Marc Siegel revealed Sunday on "Fox & Friends Weekend."
It's experimental, and in first stage testing but the COVID-19 pill called Molnupiravir, by Merck and Ridgeback Biotherapeutics, showed promising signs in reducing coronavirus in patients.
"It may be the holy grail on this because it was just studied in phase two trials and it literally stopped the virus in its tracks," he explained. "And there wasn't any virus found in the patients that were studied."
The drug would function similarly to the way Tamiflu does, as an at-home, five-day treatment to stop the virus from reproducing before causing major damage and could hit the market in as little as four to five months.
Siegel said even though the study was limited to only 182 patients so far, the pill could still be "very promising" for the future of thousands of people.
"This might be the future once the vaccine really gets control over the pandemic and we just start seeing isolated cases," he said. "By then, this drug might be ready and this might be the drug for over the next several months."
Dr. Siegel predicted, with vaccinations the U.S. will be free of the coronavirus pandemic by the summer, and that the Molnupiravir treatment could be "very helpful" for managing isolated cases.
"This is the very first pill that we have that’s something that we might be able to use in our armamentarium against COVID as a therapeutic," he said.
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LOOK: Answers to 30 common COVID-19 vaccine questions
While much is still unknown about the coronavirus and the future, what is known is that the currently available vaccines have gone through all three trial phases and are safe and effective. It will be necessary for as many Americans as possible to be vaccinated in order to finally return to some level of pre-pandemic normalcy, and hopefully these 30 answers provided here will help readers get vaccinated as soon they are able.
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