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A new pill to treat people with Covid-19 may be given emergency use authorization by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration before year’s end. The data from a late-stage clinical trial suggest that the drug, molnupiravir, can protect patients who are treated within the first five days of feeling symptoms — lowering their risk of hospitalization and death by half. But who will get them and how will they work? In this Q&A, Max Nisen and Sam Fazeli, who cover health care and the pharmaceutical industry for Bloomberg Opinion and Bloomberg Intelligence, discuss the first Covid-19 oral antivirals. (Fazeli and Nisen, 10/7)

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is begging pregnant women to get the COVID-19 vaccine, and outcomes in our own backyard show why that plea is so urgent. A study by UT Southwestern Medical Center researchers published in a medical journal this fall looked at data regarding pregnant Parkland patients spanning more than a year. Only one of the 82 pregnant patients hospitalized for severe COVID-19 was vaccinated. (10/7)

In 2015, in reaction to a measles outbreak linked to a single visitor to Disneyland, the state Legislature and Gov. Jerry Brown banned “personal belief” vaccine exemptions for students. This recognized the obvious: Schools would never be safe if large numbers of parents who bought into anti-vaccination conspiracy theories could readily keep their kids from getting the shots needed to create herd immunity to infectious diseases. (10/7)