Everything is speeding up for Merck's anti-covid pill.
While American and European regulators are examining the authorization request for Molnupiravir, France has ordered doses from the American laboratory Merck, Olivier Véran announced on Tuesday.
"50,000 doses of this drug will be delivered to France from the last days of November or the first days of December, that is to say as soon as the treatments leave the production lines", declared the Minister of Health during a Senate hearing.
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“Imagine that we had (at the start of the health crisis) an antiviral treatment which reduced the number of serious cases by 50%, imagine the health impact in our country at the heart of the first and second waves, we would have had much fewer deaths and much fewer serious cases, ”enthuses the Minister.
Merck, called MSD outside of North America to distinguish it from a German namesake, in fact reported very encouraging results for this antiviral in early October.
According to the American laboratory, which has carried out tests on nearly 800 patients but has yet to make the details public, molnupiravir halves the risk of hospitalization when it is given to patients who have just been tested positive for Covid -19.
"This communication seems to me a little premature", tempered all the same Pierre Tattevin, professor of infectious diseases at the University Hospital of Rennes in the Parisian on October 13th.
"What the lab says is very interesting, but it's in their best interest and I think their data is not strong enough at the moment."
"Vaccination, plus treatment"
According to Mr. Véran, this drug could be a game-changer in the fight against the epidemic: it has the major advantage of being taken in oral form and could therefore be used much easier than intravenous treatments such as, for example, those based on synthetic antibodies.
However, he recalled that this treatment cannot be the only response to the epidemic, stressing the importance of vaccination against Covid-19.
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"Vaccination, more antiviral treatment, more monoclonal antibodies, equal much less health impact", he insisted.
This set “would also protect us (…) in the event of an epidemic wave linked to a new variant of which we still do not know the damage it could cause”, he concluded.
The only pill among the most promising treatment projects, molnupiravir raises a lot of hope but has not yet been approved by European and American health authorities, the latter having announced on Monday that they were starting an accelerated procedure.
It still has a weak point for the moment: its high price.
If Mr. Véran did not specify the amount of the order, for example, the United States ordered 1.7 million doses for $ 1.2 billion this year, or about $ 700 for each.