Merck? That’s going to hurt their Ivermectin sales
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Or it gives them a broader market - Merck pills for sane people and Merck horse paste for lunatics.
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Break that pill open and mix it with horse paste for easy ingestion.
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Unvaccinated Americans: “oh cool now I’m definitely not getting vaccinated, I’ll just take those pills if I get sick”.
I guess they’re mostly never getting vaccinated anyway, but still.
Will dive into the background on this pill, but that’s an effectiveness that would be a massive win
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If anyone finds the original Merck study please post it! Reading through the description of the NPR article on it makes this seem like a massive, massive breakthrough. They had zero deaths in the experimental group with 8 in the control. That’s obviously not very large, but they halved hospitalization rate (14% to 7%). They ended early because it would have been unethical to continue giving people the control.
I was expecting this work to be like Tamiflu, but that is bullshit that doesn’t work.
I would like to read the primary study though, and it’s buried with all the PR about the results though.
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Time to sell all your Regeneron stock, I guess.
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Oh that reminds me!
There’s a big difference between regeneron data and data for this pill. Regeneron was a classic case of juicing a study to get a positive result. IIRC they only have gave Regeneron to people who didn’t produce an immune response to covid. Unsurprisingly that worked.
Merck gave this pill to people who were higher risk, but with simply stuff like being fat and got a huge signal. Big big news.
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I’m going to enjoy the mental gymnastics of the derpers.
-So you won’t get the vaccine?
*No way, it was too rushed and we don’t know the long term effects of the vaccine
-So I guess you aren’t gonna take this pill either. It was developed pretty quickly and it’s not possible to know what the long-term effects are.
*Oh, the pill is fine. I would take that if needed. I did my research.
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Yeah it’s silly as fuck and really illustrates how much of this is about feels. I’m sure part of it is that there’s something about vaccines that seems more sinister (to the derpers anyway) and more able to put evil terrible mind-controlling things in your body than a simple pill.
And also to this day I still think a ton of the vax excuses came from people that were legitimately terrified that zomg I’ll get this shot on Tuesday and then feel horribly ill Wednesday and Thursday (even though side effects vary a ton and lots of people barely had any) as a direct result of their decision to get the shot. They twist it around in their heads and decide that would be a dumb thing to do and instead it’s better to take what they think is a remote chance of dying or at least getting really sick by doing nothing instead. A pill with no side effects bypasses all this dumb thinking.
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I realize we know basically nothing about this pill, but is there any reason to think this pill could also be effective against other kinda-untreatable viruses like cold or flu? Or are things like this usually very specific to an individual virus? I didn’t think antiviral was really a thing (vs something like antibiotics) so I’m curious whether this could have broader implications.
This is from the article
So maybe a minority of colds. Probably not flu.
Cold is far too general of a term. It’s like saying we have a cure for cancer… there’s a lot of them out there, one thing won’t work for every thing.
Flu - no, different type of virus.
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We already have antivirals for the flu.
Not really, Tamiflu doesn’t really work. How it got approved is a mystery to me.
Yea I should have been more specific, I meant non-coronavirus colds (so wondering whether this was some breakthrough technology that was broadly antiviral or whether it was just coronavirus-specific, and maybe specific to this particular coronavirus). The quote Melk pulled makes it seem like it could help with other coronaviruses.
This was my understanding too. I should have said “effective antivirals.” I guess there are other examples like anti-HIV so maybe I’m way off base.
All I saw is the one article, but I’m guessing that it hasn’t been tested on other viruses and there is not a lot of reason to think that it would work on them. Just guessing, though. All I have done is skim the WaPo article.
Ah that’s why I missed it. I got paywalled and only read the Guardian one 
Ironically, the WSJ headline on this breakthrough says it’s “Covid-19’s Tamiflu”!
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