© 2024 Ideastream Public Media

1375 Euclid Avenue, Cleveland, Ohio 44115
(216) 916-6100 | (877) 399-3307

WKSU is a public media service licensed to Kent State University and operated by Ideastream Public Media.
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

As omicron surges, two new drugs approved to treat COVID-19 patients

As cases COVID-19 surge around the country, driven by the omicron variant, there’s some good news too. Two new treatments have been approved by the Food and Drug Administration — both of them pills shown to reduce serious illness, hospitalization and death among high-risk patients.

So what’s the difference between Merck’s Molnupiravir and Pfizer’s Paxlovid? And what other treatments are available as we head into the third year of the pandemic?

Here & Now‘s Celeste Headlee checks in with virologist Angela Rasmussen at the University of Saskatchewan.

This article was originally published on WBUR.org.

Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.