Web Desk
The antiviral drug molnupiravir has conditionally been recommended for patients with non-severe covid-19 who are at highest risk of hospitalisation, according to a statement issued by World Health Organization on Tuesday.
Patients who are at highest risk of hospitalisation typically include those who are unvaccinated, older people, and those with weak immune systems or chronic diseases.
However, young and healthy patients, including children, and pregnant and breastfeeding women should not be given the drug due to potential harms.
Molnupiravir is an antiviral medicine that works by stopping coronavirus from growing and spreading. Used as early as possible after infection, it can help prevent more severe symptoms developing.
The recommendation is based on new data from six randomised controlled trials involving 4,796 patients. This is the largest dataset on this drug so far, according to WHO experts.
Moderate certainty evidence from these trials suggests that molnupiravir reduces the risk of hospital admission (43 fewer admissions per 1,000 patients at highest risk) and time to symptom resolution (average 3.4 fewer days), while low certainty evidence suggests a small effect on mortality (6 fewer deaths per 1,000 patients).
The WHO experts panel describes mitigation strategies needed at the population level, including pharmacovigilance and antiviral resistance monitoring, given concerns about genotoxicity (damage to a cell’s genetic information causing mutations), emergence of resistance and new variants.
They make no recommendation for patients with severe or critical illness as there are no trial data on molnupiravir for this population.
And they acknowledge that cost and availability issues associated with molnupiravir may make access to low and middle income countries challenging and exacerbate health inequity.
The panel recommends a treatment combining two antibodies (casirivimab and imdevimab) to be used in people who are confirmed not to have the omicron variant, as new evidence demonstrates a lack of effectiveness against the omicron variant.
