COVID-19: can you get medicines to help fight or prevent the coronavirus?

We look at whether you can get hold of any medications, sprays or tablets to help fight COVID-19.

While vaccines remain the primary way of fighting coronavirus, pharmaceutical companies are starting to roll out medicines that might help fight the virus.

For example, pharma giants Pfizer and Merck have both created antiviral tablets to help battle the COVID 19, although both are still pending approval by the medicines regulator.

There are also numerous nasal sprays that claim to help you fight the virus, although the way they were advertised in the past has landed their advertisers in hot water. 

Ultimately, there are no approved, proven COVID pills or nasal sprays available to the UK public at the time of publishing but the situation is changing rapidly as pharmaceutical firms rush to bring their products to market.

COVID-19 tablets being trialled

The Government said in the summer that it hopes to be able to offer pills to people to take at home to fight the virus by this autumn, although that deadline looks like it might now be missed. 

Things have moved a step closer this month after the Government revealed it had bought two types of pills to treat Covid.

Specifically, it has purchased 480,000 molnupiravir tablets from Merck and 250,000 courses of PF-073 from Pfizer.

Crucially, the drugs have yet to be approved by the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency. Molnupiravir is expected to get approval in November and PF-073 in January.

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COVID-19 nasal sprays

A number of nasal sprays launched in the summer claiming that their nasal sprays could kill COVID-19.   

However, Which? raised concerns with the advertising and medical regulators that the product claims could be misleading as shoppers might think they offered outright protection rather than simply being another line of defence in protecting yourself against the coronavirus (along with masks, social distancing etc).

"What’s more, these sprays have also only been tested in relatively small lab-based studies and haven’t yet been proven effective in human clinical trials," the consumer champion added.

As a result, all the makers of these nasal sprays have either temporarily stopped selling them or changed the wording used in their marketing.

That's not to say these products definitely don't work: merely that they shouldn't be seen as a cure-all.

We’ll update this article if any new COVID-19 medications are launched in the UK.

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