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Drug manufacturer Merck on Monday requested emergency use authorization from the Food and Drug Administration for its antiviral medication, molnupiravir. While many have heralded this first-ever oral treatment for covid-19 as a game-changer, others are raising the concern that an easy-to-access treatment could further deter the unvaccinated from getting their shots. (Leana S. Wen, 10/13)

With so many conspiracy theorists embracing the view that the coronavirus escaped from a laboratory, it’s tempting to dismiss the idea out of hand. But it's important to keep an open mind — because the possibility of a lab leak still exists, and needs to be investigated. Serious people are demanding a closer look at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. There isn’t much evidence that a lab leak was the origin of the pandemic, but neither is there much evidence for any other scenario. Though scientists recently found somewhat related viruses harbored by bats in Laos, this doesn’t answer the key question of how the SARS-CoV-2 got into humans.  (Faye Flam, 10/13)

Body counts appear to support the common perception that Covid-19 does its worst damage among the old and vulnerable. But body counts mask another reality, and focusing on them is skewing policy decisions and individual choices. There’s no question that deaths were most common among old and vulnerable individuals early in the pandemic. Some politicians and academics have used death rates to conclude that the pandemic’s toll has been largely confined to the elderly and sick, and that widespread mitigation measures such as mask and vaccine mandates are unjustified. We looked at Covid-related deaths through a different lens — years of life lost — which revealed a very different picture about the burden of illness than deaths alone. (Darius Lakdawalla and Julian Reif, 10/14)

As someone with a serious genetic respiratory disease, I felt an overwhelming joy to receive the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine this past spring. I could not have imagined that, several months later, I would be risking arrest by locking arms with others to block the entrance of the pharmaceutical giant's headquarters in New York City. Dismayed by the growing "vaccine apartheid," as the head of the World Health Organization put it, we called on the company to relinquish its patents and share the technical know-how to manufacture the vaccine. That would allow production to be quickly ramped up throughout the Global South, saving millions of lives. (Eric Stoner, 10/13)