COVID-19 vaccine discussion

9 hours ago, lmao said:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/giacomotognini/2021/06/15/surging-moderna-stock-mints-the-vaccine-makers-fifth-billionaire/?sh=6cddb8ee2ee0

Right or wrong they're printing money at this point.

Weird response, but whatevs.

 

So basically it's "get a booster if you want" somewhere around 5, 6 or 8 months from your second dose, depending on who you ask.

And if you don't want a booster, you're also probably fine against severe illness.

The booster discussed is officially only for Pfizer right now, correct? I haven’t seen any official directives on a monderna booster, but maybe I missed that.
I have seen moderna has studied a booster that is half the regular dose. So people getting moderna boosters now, are they getting the full third dose? Getting that booster without any official guidance/recommendations from any of the federal agencies?

1 minute ago, shadetree said:

The booster discussed is officially only for Pfizer right now, correct? I haven’t seen any official directives on a monderna booster, but maybe I missed that.
I have seen moderna has studied a booster that is half the regular dose. So people getting moderna boosters now, are they getting the full third dose? Getting that booster without any official guidance/recommendations from any of the federal agencies?

The broader set of recommendations being discussed right now is for PFE, correct.  No guidance on MRNA yet. That being said, the previous guidance for immunocompromised related to both PFE and MRNA.  And yes, the people boosting MRNA right now are getting the elite level dosing, MRNA testing half dose for boosters. 

Edited September 24, 2021 by Anastasis

2 hours ago, Satoshi said:

 

So what was the advisory panel for?

18 minutes ago, pearlandhorn said:

So what was the advisory panel for?

Advice

49 minutes ago, pearlandhorn said:

So what was the advisory panel for?

 

30 minutes ago, Liquor and Poker said:

Advice

Pretty much. Which was disregarded/overruled by a political appointee. My impression is that is pretty rare although others here will know better than me. It’s unfortunate because this decision likely leads to mandates for potentially millions of people without much evidence to justify it. 

Keep slinging that misinformation GRUHorn.

1 minute ago, kevwun said:

Keep slinging that misinformation GRUHorn.

It’s not misinformation to say there is little evidence showing benefit as it relates to improvement in outcomes, especially in younger people. Especially as the protection against severe illness and death appears to be intact.
 

If you’re a 25 year old nurse that has had Covid and has had 2 shots you will likely now be mandated to get a booster in several jurisdictions. Is that justified? We don’t know the risk/benefit for these types of people. I hope it all goes smoothly. 

You have made hundreds of posts on this website over the past 18 months with false information and anti-vax propaganda. You have consistently downplayed the virus and have encouraged people to ignore medical advice under the guise of "just asking questions." You can get fucked. 

Do you think the bullshit you've posted on the internet throughout the pandemic has directly led to someone's death?  You've had hundreds of posts of lies and I'm sure this website isn't the only place you infect.  I bet you have killed someone.  There's a special place in hell for scum like you.

Edited September 24, 2021 by kevwun

2 minutes ago, kevwun said:

I bet you have killed someone. 

There it is.  LOL

Yeah, it's hilarious.  Every day unvaccinated people are dying because of lies they read on the internet that are spread intentionally by assholes like GRUHorn. 

Edited September 24, 2021 by kevwun

1 minute ago, BabaYaga said:

There it is.  LOL

Are tens of thousands of people not dying because they believe false information posted online?

He's the most consistent spreader on this website of the very lies leading to those deaths.

But sure, lol.

6 minutes ago, Foosters said:

Are tens of thousands of people not dying because they believe false information posted online?

He's the most consistent spreader on this website of the very lies leading to those deaths.

But sure, lol.

HE LITTERALLY KILLED SOMEONE!

Oh NOES....

 

Hey, as long as the libs get triggered, what are a few (hundred thousand) deaths, amirite?

30 minutes ago, Satoshi said:

It’s not misinformation to say there is little evidence showing benefit as it relates to improvement in outcomes, especially in younger people. Especially as the protection against severe illness and death appears to be intact.
 

If you’re a 25 year old nurse that has had Covid and has had 2 shots you will likely now be mandated to get a booster in several jurisdictions. Is that justified? We don’t know the risk/benefit for these types of people. I hope it all goes smoothly. 

We don't know the risk?  What fucking risk?  Well over 6 billion shots have been administered.  If there were risks, we would know about them by now.

 

Get fucked with that bullshit.

Long time listener (from the old site... and the even older site), first time caller.

Moderna second dose in mid-April.
Texas Cares study last month with 1,600. 
COVID as of Sunday after kid brought it home from school.

He was fine in a day. I had a pretty rough 3-4 days. Don't "feel" sick now, but still have a lingering cough and sense of smell is 100% gone. Wife had the same vaccine schedule and had about 1,200 on Texas Cares and still testing negative.

37 minutes ago, Deej said:

Yeah with the kid going to school, we just assumed it would eventually hit our house despite us trying to be careful for the past 18 months. But really thought the 1600 antibody count meant that I wouldn't get it when it did make the rounds.

I will say that the first at-home test we used on the kid showed bright positive within just a minute. Mine showed so faint that I wasn't even sure it was positive until confirmed with PCR. Maybe the brightness of the positive on the antigen test has to do with the amount of virus? Doesn't matter. That faint line turned into a decent case that knocked me down. Kid coughed for about two minutes and had a slight fever. Now he is bouncing off the walls.

It’s not misinformation to say there is little evidence showing benefit as it relates to improvement in outcomes, especially in younger people. Especially as the protection against severe illness and death appears to be intact.
 
If you’re a 25 year old nurse that has had Covid and has had 2 shots you will likely now be mandated to get a booster in several jurisdictions. Is that justified? We don’t know the risk/benefit for these types of people. I hope it all goes smoothly. 

Jesus, you really don't want people to get this free shot that has statistically zero risk. Why are you a piece of shit? Are you Greg Abbott?

5 minutes ago, DaysOff said:

Jesus, you really don't want people to get this free shot that has statistically zero risk. Why are you a piece of shit? Are you Greg Abbott?

Just needs to mention Ivermectin and he's alphahorn. 

6 hours ago, Chewbacca said:

We don't know the risk?  What fucking risk?  Well over 6 billion shots have been administered.  If there were risks, we would know about them by now.

 

Get fucked with that bullshit.

 

1 hour ago, DaysOff said:

Jesus, you really don't want people to get this free shot that has statistically zero risk. Why are you a piece of shit? Are you Greg Abbott?

This from the Lancet lays out why boosters aren’t justified without further testing. It’s signed by multiple prominent people including the two FDA officials that are resigning in protest after devoting their careers to advancing vaccines. This isn’t a fringe position. 
 

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(21)02046-8/fulltext

 

Can't wait to get my mom the booster shot. All these unvaxxed assholes have let covid linger. This is a crisis yet so many Americans have their fingers up their ass.

It's really no wonder a failed businessman got elected President of the United States. C students fucking vote.

6 minutes ago, Bookman said:

Can't wait to get my mom the booster shot. All these unvaxxed assholes have let covid linger. This is a crisis yet so many Americans have their fingers up their ass.

It's really no wonder a failed businessman got elected President of the United States. C students fucking vote.

Dude, Cloak Room is that way ----------->

You can brand water, vodka, wine, steaks, casinos, airlines, USFL teams, board games, magazines, hotels, condo towers, universities, chocolates, menswear, and even vitamins.  But it never occurred to anyone to brand vaccinations.  All anybody needed to do was, "The Moderna Vaccine...Brought to you by So-and-So." 6 billion shots in arms worldwide in the last year...and the most brilliant branding expert on Earth failed to seize on the opportunity.  It would have saved countless lives and made him hundreds of millions.  How did they not grab onto this chance?  

Oh yeah.  Right, right, right.  Wouldn't have been ethical.  My bad.

Satoshi is a shit stain and should be crowdsourced, but y’all gotta lay off the fucking hyperbole. And even if it isn’t hyperbole and somehow posts on the internet by a known idiot led to someone’s demise, well then strike up the band and play one for Darwin.

23 minutes ago, Herbie Hancock said:

Satoshi is a shit stain and should be crowdsourced, but y’all gotta lay off the fucking hyperbole. And even if it isn’t hyperbole and somehow posts on the internet by a known idiot led to someone’s demise, well then strike up the band and play one for Darwin.

Well it's more that he's on his fourth sock at this point. The community keeps telling him he's not welcome to post his disinformation here but he is on a mission

Gotta “own the libs”

The danger of the preprint server just showed up.

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.09.13.21262182v2

https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/covid-19-vaccine-study-error-anti-vaxxers-1.6188806

When the neighbor refused to get vaccinated...

 

On 9/24/2021 at 8:22 PM, Satoshi said:

 

This from the Lancet lays out why boosters aren’t justified without further testing. It’s signed by multiple prominent people including the two FDA officials that are resigning in protest after devoting their careers to advancing vaccines. This isn’t a fringe position. 
 

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(21)02046-8/fulltext

 

You've been on this site for the last 18 months advocating anti-vaxx / let's suffer and die our way out of this pandemic / 'wait, it really isn't a pandemic,  just a bad flu' / Hydrochloroquine and Ivermectin will fix this because vaccines are just corporations exercising greed positions.

Now, you are here, of course, supporting a position where there happen to be legit scientific disagreements about vaxx boosting and how we shouldn't be harming people without however-the-fuck-long-it-takes-to-get-more-data while the virus mutates and keeps coming back.  Not to mention defending FDA officials who left their positions because the administration is listening to Fauci and others instead of them?  Oh, the horror.

You're just a snappy little bitch on their second (maybe third or fourth) handle because the community has repeatedly shown you they're sick of your shit.  But you are a disinformation warrior and will not be denied.  You are an adult male chiropractor probably with a shitty Youtube channel popping wheelies on a tricycle.

All aboard the Shitoshi neg train!!!!

11 hours ago, Deej said:

When the neighbor refused to get vaccinated...

 

Older neighbor  down the street got the ride last night.  Lost his wife to cancer last year.  Haven’t seen him much since that happened.  I suspect that house will be on the market soon.

Oh Round Rock

https://www.kxan.com/news/texas/billboard-in-round-rock-urges-residents-not-to-be-bullied-into-vaccination/

2 hours ago, SizzleChest said:

Now, you are here, of course, supporting a position where there happen to be legit scientific disagreements about vaxx boosting and how we shouldn't be harming people without however-the-fuck-long-it-takes-to-get-more-data while the virus mutates and keeps coming back.  Not to mention defending FDA officials who left their positions because the administration is listening to Fauci and others instead of them?  Oh, the horror.

I don't know anything about the poster, but the article is good.

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(21)02046-8/fulltext

 

Although the benefits of primary COVID-19 vaccination clearly outweigh the risks, there could be risks if boosters are widely introduced too soon, or too frequently, especially with vaccines that can have immune-mediated side-effects (such as myocarditis, which is more common after the second dose of some mRNA vaccines,or Guillain-Barre syndrome, which has been associated with adenovirus-vectored COVID-19 vaccines. If unnecessary boosting causes significant adverse reactions, there could be implications for vaccine acceptance that go beyond COVID-19 vaccines. Thus, widespread boosting should be undertaken only if there is clear evidence that it is appropriate.

Current evidence does not, therefore, appear to show a need for boosting in the general population, in which efficacy against severe disease remains high. Even if humoral immunity appears to wane, reductions in neutralising antibody titre do not necessarily predict reductions in vaccine efficacy over time, and reductions in vaccine efficacy against mild disease do not necessarily predict reductions in the (typically higher) efficacy against severe disease. This effect could be because protection against severe disease is mediated not only by antibody responses, which might be relatively short lived for some vaccines, but also by memory responses and cell-mediated immunity, which are generally longer lived.The ability of vaccines that present the antigens of earlier phases of the pandemic (rather than variant-specific antigens) to elicit humoral immune responses against currently circulating variants ⁱndicates that these variants have not yet evolved to the point at which they are likely to escape the memory immune responses induced by those vaccines. Even without any changes in vaccine efficacy, increasing success in delivering vaccines to large populations will inevitably lead to increasing numbers of breakthrough cases, especially if vaccination leads to behavioural changes in vaccinees.

To date, none of these studies has provided credible evidence of substantially declining protection against severe disease, even when there appear to be declines over time in vaccine efficacy against symptomatic disease.

 

Conclusion:

If boosters (whether expressing original or variant antigens) are ultimately to be used, there will be a need to identify specific circumstances in which the direct and indirect benefits of doing so are, on balance, clearly beneficial. Additional research could help to define such circumstances. Furthermore, given the robust booster responses reported for some vaccines, adequate booster responses might be achievable at lower doses, potentially with reduced safety concerns. Given the data gaps, any wide deployment of boosters should be accompanied by a plan to gather reliable data about how well they are working and how safe they are. Their effectiveness and safety could, in some populations, be assessed most reliably during deployment via extremely large-scale randomisation,¹⁷ preferably of individuals rather than of groups.

 

Thus, any decisions about the need for boosting or timing of boosting should be based on careful analyses of adequately controlled clinical or epidemiological data, or both, indicating a persistent and meaningful reduction in severe disease, with a benefit–risk evaluation that considers the number of severe cases that boosting would be expected to prevent, along with evidence about whether a specific boosting regimen is likely to be safe and effective against currently circulating variants. As more information becomes available, it may first provide evidence that boosting is needed in some subpopulations. However, these high-stakes decisions should be based on peer-reviewed and publicly available data and robust international scientific discussion.

 

The vaccines that are currently available are safe, effective, and save lives. The limited supply of these vaccines will save the most lives if made available to people who are at appreciable risk of serious disease and have not yet received any vaccine. Even if some gain can ultimately be obtained from boosting, it will not outweigh the benefits of providing initial protection to the unvaccinated. If vaccines are deployed where they would do the most good, they could hasten the end of the pandemic by inhibiting further evolution of variants. Indeed, WHO has called for a moratorium on boosting until the benefits of primary vaccination have been made available to more people around the world.¹⁸ This is a compelling issue, particularly as the currently available evidence does not show the need for widespread use of booster vaccination in populations that have received an effective primary vaccination regimen.

Is the WHO taking into account the millions of stupid cunts not getting g even one shot here in the great ole Merica?

It's truly the first Catch-22 I've seen in my lifetime.  You need more vaccinated adults to get some kinda herd immunity.  But we're literally getting to watch hundreds of thousands of stupid people die and improve overall society.  I guess "addition by subtraction"? 

If I'm being insensitive, I'll apologize when this is all over.  

27 minutes ago, Lobo said:

It's truly the first Catch-22 I've seen in my lifetime.  You need more vaccinated adults to get some kinda herd immunity.  But we're literally getting to watch hundreds of thousands of stupid people die and improve overall society.  I guess "addition by subtraction"? 

If I'm being insensitive, I'll apologize when this is all over.  

Well, as the antivaxxers succumb, the percentage of vaccinated goes up.

Well, as the antivaxxers succumb, the percentage of vaccinated goes up.

9 hours ago, Bevo said:

I don't know anything about the poster, but the article is good.

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(21)02046-8/fulltext

 

Although the benefits of primary COVID-19 vaccination clearly outweigh the risks, there could be risks if boosters are widely introduced too soon, or too frequently, especially with vaccines that can have immune-mediated side-effects (such as myocarditis, which is more common after the second dose of some mRNA vaccines,or Guillain-Barre syndrome, which has been associated with adenovirus-vectored COVID-19 vaccines. If unnecessary boosting causes significant adverse reactions, there could be implications for vaccine acceptance that go beyond COVID-19 vaccines. Thus, widespread boosting should be undertaken only if there is clear evidence that it is appropriate.

Current evidence does not, therefore, appear to show a need for boosting in the general population, in which efficacy against severe disease remains high. Even if humoral immunity appears to wane, reductions in neutralising antibody titre do not necessarily predict reductions in vaccine efficacy over time, and reductions in vaccine efficacy against mild disease do not necessarily predict reductions in the (typically higher) efficacy against severe disease. This effect could be because protection against severe disease is mediated not only by antibody responses, which might be relatively short lived for some vaccines, but also by memory responses and cell-mediated immunity, which are generally longer lived.The ability of vaccines that present the antigens of earlier phases of the pandemic (rather than variant-specific antigens) to elicit humoral immune responses against currently circulating variants ⁱndicates that these variants have not yet evolved to the point at which they are likely to escape the memory immune responses induced by those vaccines. Even without any changes in vaccine efficacy, increasing success in delivering vaccines to large populations will inevitably lead to increasing numbers of breakthrough cases, especially if vaccination leads to behavioural changes in vaccinees.

To date, none of these studies has provided credible evidence of substantially declining protection against severe disease, even when there appear to be declines over time in vaccine efficacy against symptomatic disease.

 

Conclusion:

If boosters (whether expressing original or variant antigens) are ultimately to be used, there will be a need to identify specific circumstances in which the direct and indirect benefits of doing so are, on balance, clearly beneficial. Additional research could help to define such circumstances. Furthermore, given the robust booster responses reported for some vaccines, adequate booster responses might be achievable at lower doses, potentially with reduced safety concerns. Given the data gaps, any wide deployment of boosters should be accompanied by a plan to gather reliable data about how well they are working and how safe they are. Their effectiveness and safety could, in some populations, be assessed most reliably during deployment via extremely large-scale randomisation,¹⁷ preferably of individuals rather than of groups.

 

Thus, any decisions about the need for boosting or timing of boosting should be based on careful analyses of adequately controlled clinical or epidemiological data, or both, indicating a persistent and meaningful reduction in severe disease, with a benefit–risk evaluation that considers the number of severe cases that boosting would be expected to prevent, along with evidence about whether a specific boosting regimen is likely to be safe and effective against currently circulating variants. As more information becomes available, it may first provide evidence that boosting is needed in some subpopulations. However, these high-stakes decisions should be based on peer-reviewed and publicly available data and robust international scientific discussion.

 

The vaccines that are currently available are safe, effective, and save lives. The limited supply of these vaccines will save the most lives if made available to people who are at appreciable risk of serious disease and have not yet received any vaccine. Even if some gain can ultimately be obtained from boosting, it will not outweigh the benefits of providing initial protection to the unvaccinated. If vaccines are deployed where they would do the most good, they could hasten the end of the pandemic by inhibiting further evolution of variants. Indeed, WHO has called for a moratorium on boosting until the benefits of primary vaccination have been made available to more people around the world.¹⁸ This is a compelling issue, particularly as the currently available evidence does not show the need for widespread use of booster vaccination in populations that have received an effective primary vaccination regimen.

That is a good article. This one is pretty good too.

 

https://www.bmj.com/content/374/bmj.n2320

Wasn't surprised when I got a notification Friday night from a mutual friend that one of our friends whom I had cut off contact after he went full Evang-MAGA anti-vax had died from Covid. Took it as the second shoe drop. Matter-of-fact. But now as it's processing, I'm just getting angrier and angrier. 

12 hours ago, MissingInAction said:

Is the WHO taking into account the millions of stupid cunts not getting g even one shot here in the great ole Merica?

No, more of what the articles are saying is that without knowing when someone can benefit from a booster, the world would be better off shipping the vaccine to a third world country. The more people in the world who get vaccinated (at least with the first series), the lower the chance of breakthrough infections and the lower the chance of new, more infectious variants. And the articles aren't saying that boosters are bad. They are saying that there could be potential side-effects like carditis so more data is necessary to determine booster dosage and timing for subpopulations.

Pretty sure I had pericarditis after my second dose of the Pfizer vax. I’m fine now. Not interested in a booster. Next year I might consider J&J depending on the science.  
 

Anyone else given a minute of thought as to where we’d be right now if delta had happened and there was no vaccine prophylaxis?  Pretty grim, I’d say. 

Probably fighting each other over supplies in a horse stable somewhere.

Only think I know is 35% of this country would have found another way to kill themselves and take some innocents out with them.  

Well fuck. My work buddy’s mom caught a breakthrough case a couple weeks ago and has been on a vent. She passed this morning. He closed the biggest deal of his career last week. What a fucking roller coaster.

6 hours ago, Pato del Muerto said:

Anyone else given a minute of thought as to where we’d be right now if delta had happened and there was no vaccine prophylaxis?  Pretty grim, I’d say. 

i remember some back of the envelope math when this all started saying we might ultimately end up with a 2% death rate.  6MM in the US.

dashboard looks like we might hit stage 3 tomorrow.

 

edit: we = travis county

Edited September 27, 2021 by OneOfTheOutOfFocusGuys

Not sure if this has been posted or not but this seems like positive news.

https://www.cnn.com/2021/09/27/health/covid-treatment-pill-khn-partner/index.html

Quote

Within a day of testing positive for covid-19 in June, Miranda Kelly was sick enough to be scared. At 44, with diabetes and high blood pressure, Kelly, a certified nursing assistant, was having trouble breathing, symptoms serious enough to send her to the emergency room.

When her husband, Joe, 46, fell ill with the virus, too, she really got worried, especially about their five teenagers at home: "I thought, 'I hope to God we don't wind up on ventilators. We have children. Who's going to raise these kids?"

But the Kellys, who live in Seattle, had agreed just after their diagnoses to join a clinical trial at the nearby Fred Hutch cancer research center that's part of an international effort to test an antiviral treatment that could halt covid early in its course.

By the next day, the couple were taking four pills, twice a day. Though they weren't told whether they had received an active medication or placebo, within a week, they said, their symptoms were better. Within two weeks, they had recovered.

"I don't know if we got the treatment, but I kind of feel like we did," Miranda Kelly said. "To have all these underlying conditions, I felt like the recovery was very quick."

In a matter of days, Pfizer CEO says they'll be ready to ask for approval of a Covid-19 vaccine for kids

The Kellys have a role in developing what could be the world's next chance to thwart covid: a short-term regimen of daily pills that can fight the virus early after diagnosis and conceivably prevent symptoms from developing after exposure.

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"Oral antivirals have the potential to not only curtail the duration of one's covid-19 syndrome, but also have the potential to limit transmission to people in your household if you are sick," said Timothy Sheahan, a virologist at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill who has helped pioneer these therapies.

Antivirals are already essential treatments for other viral infections, including hepatitis C and HIV. One of the best known is Tamiflu, the widely prescribed pill that can shorten the duration of influenza and reduce the risk of hospitalization if given quickly.

The medications, developed to treat and prevent viral infections in people and animals, work differently depending on the type. But they can be engineered to boost the immune system to fight infection, block receptors so viruses can't enter healthy cells, or lower the amount of active virus in the body.

At least three promising antivirals for covid are being tested in clinical trials, with results expected as soon as late fall or winter, said Carl Dieffenbach, director of the Division of AIDS at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who is overseeing antiviral development.

"I think that we will have answers as to what these pills are capable of within the next several months," Dieffenbach said.

Covid-19 vaccine boosters can begin for some US adults as CDC partially diverges from its advisers' recommendations

The top contender is a medication from Merck & Co. and Ridgeback Biotherapeutics called molnupiravir, Dieffenbach said. This is the product being tested in the Kellys' Seattle trial. Two others include a candidate from Pfizer, known as PF-07321332, and AT-527, an antiviral produced by Roche and Atea Pharmaceuticals.

They work by interfering with the virus's ability to replicate in human cells. In the case of molnupiravir, the enzyme that copies the viral genetic material is forced to make so many mistakes that the virus can't reproduce. That, in turn, reduces the patient's viral load, shortening infection time and preventing the kind of dangerous immune response that can cause serious illness or death.

So far, only one antiviral drug, remdesivir, has been approved to treat covid. But it is given intravenously to patients ill enough to be hospitalized, and is not intended for early, widespread use. By contrast, the top contenders under study can be packaged as pills.

Sheahan, who also performed preclinical work on remdesivir, led an early study in mice that showed that molnupiravir could prevent early disease caused by SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes covid. The formula was discovered at Emory University and later acquired by Ridgeback and Merck.

Clinical trials have followed, including an early trial of 202 participants last spring that showed that molnupiravir rapidly reduced the levels of infectious virus. Merck chief executive Robert Davis said this month that the company expects data from its larger phase 3 trials in the coming weeks, with the potential to seek emergency use authorization from the Food and Drug Administration "before year-end."

Pfizer launched a combined phase 2 and 3 trial of its product Sept. 1, and Atea officials said they expect results from phase 2 and phase 3 trials later this year.

If the results are positive and emergency use is granted for any product, Dieffenbach said, "distribution could begin quickly."

That would mean millions of Americans soon could have access to a daily orally administered medication, ideally a single pill, that could be taken for five to 10 days at the first confirmation of covid infection.

"When we get there, that's the idea," said Dr. Daniel Griffin, an infectious diseases and immunology expert at Columbia University. "To have this all around the country, so that people get it the same day they get diagnosed."

5 things to know about coronavirus booster shots

Once sidelined for lack of interest, oral antivirals to treat coronavirus infections are now a subject of fierce competition and funding. In June, the Biden administration announced it had agreed to obtain about 1.7 million treatment courses of Merck's molnupiravir, at a cost of $1.2 billion, if the product receives emergency authorization or full approval. The same month, the administration said it would invest $3.2 billion in the Antiviral Program for Pandemics, which aims to develop antivirals for the covid crisis and beyond, Dieffenbach said.

The pandemic kick-started a long-neglected effort to develop potent antiviral treatments for coronaviruses, said Sheahan. Though the original SARS virus in 2003 gave scientists a scare — followed by Middle East respiratory syndrome, or MERS, in 2012 — research efforts slowed when those outbreaks did not persist.

"The commercial drive to develop any products just went down the tubes," said Sheahan.

Widely available antiviral drugs would join the monoclonal antibody therapies already used to treat and prevent serious illness and hospitalizations caused by covid. The lab-produced monoclonal antibodies, which mimic the body's natural response to infection, were easier to develop but must be given primarily through intravenous infusions.

The federal government is covering the cost of most monoclonal products at $2,000 a dose. It's still too early to know how the price of antivirals might compare.

Like the monoclonal antibodies, antiviral pills would be no substitute for vaccination, said Griffin. They would be another tool to fight covid. "It's nice to have another option," he said.

One challenge in developing antiviral drugs quickly has been recruiting enough participants for the clinical trials, each of which needs to enroll many hundreds of people, said Dr. Elizabeth Duke, a Fred Hutch research associate overseeing its molnupiravir trial.

Participants must be unvaccinated and enrolled in the trial within five days of a positive covid test. Any given day, interns make 100 calls to newly covid-positive people in the Seattle area — and most say no.

"Just generally speaking, there's a lot of mistrust about the scientific process," Duke said. "And some of the people are saying kind of nasty things to the interns."

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If the antiviral pills prove effective, the next challenge will be ramping up a distribution system that can rush them to people as soon as they test positive. Griffin said it will take something akin to the program set up last year by UnitedHealthcare, which sped Tamiflu kits to 200,000 at-risk patients enrolled in the insurer's Medicare Advantage plans.

Merck officials predicted the company could produce more than 10 million courses of therapy by the end of the year. Atea and Pfizer have not released similar estimates.

Even more promising? Studies evaluating whether antivirals can prevent infection after exposure.

"Think about that," said Duke, who is also overseeing a prophylactic trial. "You could give it to everyone in a household, or everyone in a school. Then we're talking about a return to, maybe, normal life."