new drugs you can take at home. antiviral pills you can take to prevent serious illness and hospitalization. the one from pfizer that was approved yesterday appears to be more effective and to have potentially fewer side effects, fewer safety concerns, fewer other things to worry about than the one that was approved from merck today. so pfizer one appears to be a preferable option to the one from merck. both in terms of effectiveness and complications. but the one from pfizer, the better one is in really, really, really limited supply and will be for a long while yet. the merck one, the one not as good, the one that is not useful for a lot of people for a lot of different reasons, there is more supply of that one. but, again, it is not as effective and has safety concerns that the other one doesn t. the merck one was basically approved today as something to be used for if other treatments aren t available or aren t appropriate for some reason. a whole bunch of restrictions. only for ad
vaccine, some people also want the option of getting an mrna second dose. so having that approval will be important, too. we should know in the next two to three weeks on that front. the vaccine advisers will convene again on october 26th, in about four weeks, to discuss the pfizer vaccine for children ages 5 to 11. does that mean kids that age could start getting vaccinated, potentially later this month. at this point, it s looking like the timeline, even if the even if pfizer is able to get in their application in time for the fda to review by that october 26th meeting. it looks then like the cdc will be meeting the following week, which i m not sure if we re going to make the end of october deadline, but i m hopeful still for end of october, at least early november. merck today announced, dr. wen, it has developed an antiviral pill that reduces the risk of death or hospitalization from covid by half. how much of a potential game changer could this be?