383 - Molnupiravir: The Game-changing Oral Antiviral Pill for COVID-19?
Public Health On Call
The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
4.6 • 644 Ratings
🗓️ 13 October 2021
⏱️ 15 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This week, Merck applied for FDA Emergency Use Authorization for its COVID-19 oral antiviral drug, molnupiravir. Dr. Carl Dieffenbach, director of the Division of AIDS at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, talks with Stephanie Desmon about how the drug works to help people recover from COVID-19 quicker and the drug's history starting a decade ago as an experimental treatment for Ebola. Dieffenbach talks about how the drug could complement pandemic response and why it's not a substitute for vaccination. *Note: This podcast was recorded on October 6.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Season 4 of Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. |
| 0:13.0 | I'm Josh Sharfstein, Vice Dean for Public Health Practice and Community Engagement, and a former Commissioner of Health in Baltimore City. |
| 0:20.0 | Our goal is to bring |
| 0:21.7 | scientific evidence and experience to current topics in public health through engaging interviews |
| 0:27.1 | with scientists, community leaders, policy experts, public health officials, clinicians, and more. |
| 0:32.8 | If you have ideas or questions for us to cover, please email us at public health question at jh.edu. |
| 0:40.4 | That's public health question at jh.g.u.edu for future podcast episodes. |
| 0:46.6 | Hi, I'm Lindsay Smith-Rogers, producer of Public Health On Call. Today, Stephanie Desmond talks to |
| 0:51.9 | Carl Diefenbach, director of the Division of AIDS |
| 0:54.9 | at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. |
| 0:59.0 | They discuss the development of oral antiviral medication, |
| 1:02.7 | how soon it could be before we can take these COVID-19 pills, |
| 1:06.4 | and how they may change the trajectory of the pandemic. |
| 1:09.8 | Let's listen. Carl Diefenbach, thanks so much for |
| 1:12.9 | joining me. Pleasure to be with you today. Today the topic is, for the most part, oral antifirals |
| 1:19.5 | and how they are being developed and what they could mean for the COVID pandemic as we know it. |
| 1:25.5 | So could you start with telling us what is under development and how they work? |
| 1:30.3 | Yeah, so think about coronavirus disease and what we have been through is we've seen the disease |
| 1:38.2 | pattern where a number of people convalesce very easily and others get sick and progress. So the goal of the use of |
| 1:46.4 | these oral antibiotic or oral antivirals is to prevent people from getting sicker so they can |
| 1:54.7 | rehabilitate faster. So that's basically the idea. So it's like any other drug. You get an infection, |
| 2:02.1 | you take the drug, you get better, you move on. And that's the goal. The history on antivirals, |
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