I'm Joe Gradyton and I'm Terry Grady welcome to this podcast of the People's Pharmacy.

You can find previous podcasts and more information on a range of health topics at people's pharmacy.

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COVID-19 continues to infect and kill far too many.

Will new pills from Merck and Pfizer change the course of the pandemic?

This is the People's Pharmacy with Terry and Joe Grayden.

Our guest, Dr. Ralph Barric is one of the world's leading experts on coronaviruses.

He was involved in the development of antiviral medicines, including Ramesevir and Molnipiravir.

He'll give us an insider's perspective on the new antiviral pills under review, the FDA. Will we continue to need vaccine boosters every six months to prevent infection?

If the coronavirus is here to stay, how do we need to adapt as a society?

Coming up on the People's Pharmacy,

the future of new pills when COVID-19 first appeared late in 2019,

it seemed there were just two outcomes for people who caught it. They died, or they got better.

Nearly two years later, scientists are looking at outcomes with a lot more nuance.

A recent study suggests that many people who had a

positive COVID-19 test were still reporting some troublesome symptoms up to 10

months later. The scientists used a pre-existing database including

11 million patients of primary care practices in Great Britain. 200,000 of these people tested positive for SARS-Cove 2 during the pandemic.

Follow-up surveys revealed that people who had been infected were three times as likely to have trouble sleeping as those who had not.

Fatigue was six times more common among the previously infected during the follow-up period.

This week, Pfizer submitted its application to the FDA for emergency use authorization of its new oral antiviral drug Paxlevid.

This follows on the heels of Merck's request for

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