The U.S. government is investing $3.2 billion in the effort to develop an antiviral pill that could help COVID-19 patients in the first days of their infection.
The initiative, which was announced on Thursday by the Department of Health and Human Services, gives a funding boost to research already in progress. A pill might be available to the public by the end of the year.
More from The New York Times:
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and a key backer of the program, said he looked forward to a time when Covid-19 patients could pick up antiviral pills from a pharmacy as soon as they tested positive for the coronavirus or develop Covid-19 symptoms.
Such pills already exist for other viruses, including influenza and HIV.
“We need this set of tools to close out this pandemic…The hard thing is to recognize with all the success, there’s still several hundred deaths a day,” said David Kessler, chief science officer for the nation’s COVID-19 response.
The U.S. has already invested $18 billion in vaccine research, a wildly successful use of government funds that has resulted in five effective methods of inoculation.
But Fauci and Kessler have been brainstorming about how to spur development of an anti-viral pill for months. The Washington Post describes why it has been an uphill effort:
Several scientists who have worked on developing antivirals said that appetite for the drug class had decreased, in part because there wasn’t a clear commercial model. The hope is the new government effort, if it succeeds in a way similar to the investment into HIV, could remove much of the iouncertainty from the process.
Fauci told The New York Times that a pill could quickly be prescribed to stop a COVID-19 infection from worsening:
“I wake up in the morning, I don’t feel very well, my sense of smell and taste go away, I get a sore throat,” Dr. Fauci said in an interview. “I call up my doctor and I say, ‘I have Covid and I need a prescription.’”
