Three things for October 12
1. Merck requests FDA to approve pill to treat COVID-19
On Monday, Oct. 11, the pharmaceutical company Merck requested the Food and Drug Administration approve its new pill molnupiravir for emergency use in the United States.
Currently, all FDA-approved COVID-19 treatments require either IV or injection, and the pill could have a massive impact on COVID-19 treatment. In early trials of the drug where it was used to treat cases of COVID-19 ranging from mild to moderate, it showed promising results in decreasing the risk of hospitalization and death, the Washington Post reports.
“The value here is that it’s a pill, so you don’t have to deal with the infusion centers and all the factors around that,” said Dr. Nicholas Kartsonis, senior vice president of clinical research in Merck’s infectious disease unit. “I think it’s a very powerful tool to add to the toolbox.”
If the pill is approved, Merck announced it will give the U.S. 1.7 million courses of the drug in a statement released earlier this month.
2. New study shows 85% of the global population could be affected by climate change
According to a study published by Nature Climate Change, 85% of the worldwide population may have experienced the effects of climate change.
The study looked at data from approximately 102,000 instances that could be linked to climate change and used the language model Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers to evaluate each case.
After reviewing the data, the researchers partnered it with changes in precipitation and temperature that were ascribable to humans; the study showed these impacts of global warming could be affecting 80% of the world’s land area, on which 85% of the world’s population lives, the Washington Post reports.
“We have a huge evidence base now that documents how climate change is affecting our societies and our ecosystems,” said Max Callaghan, a researcher at the Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change in Germany, who was the lead author of the study.
3. US-based economists win Nobel economics prize
Three U.S.-based economists — David Card, Joshua D. Angrist and Guido W. Imbens — received the Nobel prize in economics on Monday, Oct. 11.
The three economists received the prize for their work in natural experiments, which rely on policy changes or events that help researchers to observe how they impact the public.
Card received half of the prize for his early work focused on how the minimum wage affects employment. In the early 1990s, he and the late Alan Kruger compared wages in fast-food restaurants in New Jersey and Pennsylvania to determine if there was a link between a higher minimum wage and drops in employment. The research concluded there was no causation.
The other two recipients, Angrist and Imbens, won the prize for creating a framework that allows data that does not fall into the traditional categories of the scientific method to be interpreted.
The Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel contains $1.1 million and a gold medal, and it will be divided between the economists, with Card getting one half and Angrist and Imbens receiving the other half.
