Curious about this since “you’re a lot less likely to get sick in winter” sounds like an extremely desirable OTC consumer product and one even employers might have incentives to support. Is it that the efficacy works on a population level by keeping R values down but isn’t reliable enough at preventing symptoms on an individual level for consumers to believe in it?
I think that if the broadly effective antiviral prophylactic was truly effective on an individual level, then there could be a reasonable market for it. But the market value would be based on its efficacy at protecting individuals, not on transmission reduction.
Which I think is fine—in the absence of specific incentives to make drugs that reduce transmission, a strategy that involves bringing transmission reduction “along for the ride” on otherwise already-valuable drugs makes sense to me.
Curious about this since “you’re a lot less likely to get sick in winter” sounds like an extremely desirable OTC consumer product and one even employers might have incentives to support. Is it that the efficacy works on a population level by keeping R values down but isn’t reliable enough at preventing symptoms on an individual level for consumers to believe in it?
I think that’s the idea but I also don’t know that many details
I think that if the broadly effective antiviral prophylactic was truly effective on an individual level, then there could be a reasonable market for it. But the market value would be based on its efficacy at protecting individuals, not on transmission reduction.
Which I think is fine—in the absence of specific incentives to make drugs that reduce transmission, a strategy that involves bringing transmission reduction “along for the ride” on otherwise already-valuable drugs makes sense to me.