Covid-19 roundup: Mer­ck and Ridge­back re­port ear­ly da­ta for an oral an­tivi­ral to fight the pan­dem­ic; Aus­tria pulls a batch of As­traZeneca’s vac­cine af­ter pa­tient death

A cou­ple of months af­ter scrap­ping its Covid-19 vac­cine pro­gram, Mer­ck has read out ear­ly da­ta for an oral an­tivi­ral it’s de­vel­op­ing with Ridge­back Bio­ther­a­peu­tics, which ex­perts say could be the Tam­i­flu of coro­n­avirus treat­ments.

The part­ners say mol­nupi­ravir — in­vent­ed at an Emory Uni­ver­si­ty spin­out — led to a re­duc­tion in pos­i­tive vi­ral cul­ture in Phase IIa sub­jects, ac­cord­ing to pre­lim­i­nary da­ta. The study in­clud­ed 202 non-hos­pi­tal­ized adults who had Covid-19 symp­toms with­in sev­en days of par­tic­i­pa­tion and test­ed pos­i­tive for the virus. On day 5, re­searchers de­tect­ed the virus in the cell cul­tures of ze­ro of 47 mol­nupi­ravir pa­tients, as op­posed to 24% (or 6 of 25) place­bo pa­tients, Ridge­back and Mer­ck an­nounced.

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