preventative vaccines. but this is an exciting development, as the first company to report trial results of a pill to treat covid as other companies also work on similar treatments. mark lobel, bbc news. well, let s speak now to epidemiologist and health economist doctor eric fogel ding, whojoins us from washington. feigl ding. doctor feigl ding, thank you forjoining us. took us three how this pill works? this pill is quite remarkable. it is not based on any spiked proteins like the vaccines are, it is agnostic to variants, because it targets the molecular machinery of the virus. it has lots of nonsense code. it completely corrupts the gino of the virus, so that it can t replicate. de genome. and that s the beauty. evenif genome. and that s the beauty. even if the virus mutates, it