These antivirals treat COVID-19 in people at high risk of severe disease, and they must be started within days of symptoms beginning to work. Paxlovid blocks the protease the virus needs to assemble itself and is the most effective of the three, but it interacts with a long list of common medicines. Remdesivir and molnupiravir instead sabotage the copying of the viral genome.
The facts on this page are pulled directly from official U.S. FDA datasets — they are not written from memory. Each field below names the dataset it came from, so you can check it yourself.
Plain-English summaries and drug-class explainers are written and reviewed by the Priya Life Science editorial team, led by Sreepriya Prasannan (MSc Digital Transformation of Life Sciences (Innopharma Education / Griffith College); MSc & BSc Botany). Data is retrieved automatically from the sources above and cross-checked with AI-assisted verification (Anthropic's Claude) — brand and generic names are matched against the exact FDA product record so that a combination product or a different formulation cannot be mistaken for the drug on this page. An editor reviews the result before publication. We describe this in full in our editorial standards and corrections policy. The FDA data on this page was last retrieved on 12 Aug 2026.