The full article title is:

Merck and Ridgeback’s Investigational Oral Antiviral Molnupiravir Reduced the Risk of Hospitalization or Death by Approximately 50 Percent Compared to Placebo for Patients with Mild or Moderate COVID-19 in Positive Interim Analysis of Phase 3 Study

The HN one is somewhat arbidged.

There's a joke in here about the conflation of the data all throughout the pandemic and how there's been a failure to differentiate between with Covid and from Covid.

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2021/09/covid-hos...

There’s maybe an amusing counter point from this study. Here they ran a trial with a highly at risk population (due to comorbidities) and reduced hospitalization by 50%. I guess it’s possible the drug is 100% effective and the hospitalization of the remainder were driven by other factors, but even in that case you’d be overestimating hospitalization by just a factor of two. And since none of the people who received the drug died, I guess it’s good indirect evidence that we’re counting covid deaths among the high risk, diagnosed population reasonably well?

Funny that we just assume that anyways these days.

I had to check the title to make sure it is not there. I totally read "from COVID-19" in my mind.