Ensuring rapid and equitable access to effective oral COVID-19 therapies is essential to reducing health disparities from COVID-19 and building a better response system for future epidemics and pandemics. A multipronged strategy for medical countermeasures must include antivirals, monoclonal antibodies, and other mechanisms to fight infections. Better strategies to deploy oral antivirals, which have been important in the context of COVID-19, will also help to prepare the system to deploy medical countermeasures at a large scale in future outbreaks.