Etiotropic therapy of the new coronavirus infection: expectations and realities at the beginning of 2022. Part 1

The review includes an analysis of the latest literature data on the etiotropic therapy of a new coronavirus infection. The search for an effective antiviral treatment for SARS-CoV-2 infection is ongoing. Often, the urgent need for an antiviral drug was a pretext for testing drugs without pharmacological justification, bypassing the generally accepted procedure for conducting multi-stage clinical trials. In this regard, many clinical trials involving thousands of patients did not demonstrate the high efficacy and safety of drugs that were chosen as etiotropic therapy. In this review, we focused on the efficacy and safety of those drugs that have been studied in sufficient detail, which are reflected in international publications, and are also included in Russian guidelines for use on an outpatient practice: favipiravir and molnupiravir. The mechanism of action of antiviral drugs, their effectiveness and possible side effects were studied in clinical trials, the results of which are in the open press, which made it possible to analyze these drugs in terms of the appropriateness of their use in real clinical practice.