In the wake of unequal vaccine rollouts, countries face a ?Wild West? scramble for covid pills

Effective use of the pills — which include Pfizer’s Paxlovid and Merck’s molnupiravir, co-developed with Ridgeback Biotherapeutics and Emory University — also requires access to coronavirus tests, which remain scarce in many places.However, some signs indicate that the distribution of the drugs, which were shown in studies to be effective in lowering the risk of hospitalization and death, could shake out quite differently than for vaccines. The treatments use small molecule technology, far easier to replicate than the technology needed for vaccines.“Any decent manufacturer of medicines can make it,” Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla said of Paxlovid at a health-care conference this week.Pfizer and Merck both agreed last year to share the licenses for their drugs with the United Nations-backed Medicine Patent Pool, a nonprofit that aims to improve access to medicines, as well as with specific producers — which has not been done for any coronavirus vaccine.Under the agreement, each company would allow generic versions of the drugs to cover more than half of the world’s population, with Pfizer and Merck retaining the market control for high-income and upper-middle-income countries.The generic versions of the drug would not only aid manufacturing, but they would probably be cheaper.