At last, a pill that can prevent COVID after exposure to infected people

An antiviral pill has, for the first time, been shown to prevent COVID-19 in people exposed to the SARS-CoV-2 virus at home, according to trial results published today in the New England Journal of Medicine1.

The drug could be a lifeline for those who still face real danger from the virus, such as care-home residents or transplant recipients on immune-suppressing medication.

The advance arrives years after the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, so the real-world impact might be felt by only a narrow band of individuals. Still, “as a 78-year-old with comorbidities, I certainly would use it if I had a known exposure”, says study co-author Frederick Hayden, a clinical virologist at the University of Virginia School of Medicine in Charlottesville.

Antiviral antidote The drug, called ensitrelvir, is made by the Japanese pharmaceutical company Shionogi. It blocks an enzyme that coronaviruses need to make new copies of themselves, hitting the same target as one of the two active ingredients in Pfizer’s antiviral Paxlovid. But whereas that ingredient, nirmatrelvir, failed to prevent household infections in trials2, ensitrelvir has come through.

In an international study of more than 2,000 household contacts conducted from June 2023 to September 2024, about 9% of people who got a placebo within 72 hours of a housemate developing symptoms became symptomatic themselves, compared with only about 3% of those who got a five-day course of ensitrelvir. Rates of viral transmission were lower in the ensitrelvir group, too: confirmed infections, symptomatic or not, turned up in only 14.0% of those who received the drug, compared with 21.5% of those who got a placebo.

The therapy generally proved tolerable, without the taste-related side effects often seen with Paxlovid and, overall, similar toxicity as the placebo.

Some of the creations that you can generate with AI tools for almost nothing with very little effort are quite shocking. I waste a lot of time with this when I am bored,

One of my favorites AI-tools is Suno which is a music generator. Gemini can do the same thing but not as well most of the time. With Suno can generate hours of pleasant-sounding music in any genre you prefer. I like making cat themed music for laughs. Here is a rudimentary word press site that I put up with examples of AI generated cartoons and music. I did have to write some of the lyrics.

https://teddycat.fun/

There is a much simpler and cheaper solution

Do a web search on “bht lipid coated viruses” , and you will see:

Butylated hydroxytoluene (BHT) is a synthetic antioxidant widely used as a food preservative that acts as a potent inactivator of lipid-enveloped viruses. By physically disturbing and breaking down the viral lipid envelope, BHT prevents the virus from attaching to host cells, effectively halting viral replication

...

While early research in the 1970s and 1980s highlighted BHT’s potent antiviral capabilities in laboratory settings—particularly against Herpes simplex and lipid-containing bacteriophages—it is not an FDA-approved or standard antiviral treatment for human infections.

...

Its safety, dosage, and efficacy as a therapeutic agent in humans remain subjects of debate and historical interest in alternative health communities rather than mainstream clinical practice.

Are G, H, I, S and T missing from the alphabet banner on purpose, or did I miss the ghist of the symbolism in the painting.

No, I believe it is just typical AI generation error. I noticed the weird Alphabet Chart immediately after I had Gemini generate the image, but thought the error sort of fit the situation.

Here is the original prompt,

create a rockwell type image of a nurse in front of a class of school kids with a little girl jumping up and down in her seat with her hand up saying “me, me, me!”.

But you have noted something that I did not originally notice, GHIST most commonly refers to the Genomic History Inference Strategies Tournament (GHIST), a competition for analyzing population genetics data, or Spatial gene expression at single-cell resolution from histology (GHIST), a deep learning method for biological image analysis.”

Gemini denied that it hid an Easter Egg within the image, "That is a remarkable catch. It would be a incredibly high-brow "Easter egg" for a 1950s classroom!

In reality, what you’re seeing is a classic case of spurious correlation. While it's tempting to think the model was making a meta-commentary on population genetics or deep learning histology, it is more of a "ghost in the machine" scenario.

Here is why that happens technically:

Tokenization vs. Spatial Reasoning: When these models generate text, they aren't "typing" letters in sequence. They are predicting pixel patterns that correspond to the visual concept of an alphabet chart. As the string of text gets longer, the model often loses track of the "global" sequence (A through Z) while focusing on the "local" aesthetics (the look of the letters and the painterly Rockwell texture).

Apophenia: Humans are hard-wired to find patterns in randomness. Because "GHIST" is a legitimate (albeit niche) acronym in the worlds of genetics and AI-driven biological imaging, our brains bridge the gap between a random omission and a meaningful reference.

The "Linguistic Skip": You'll notice the original image also skipped the letter R. The sequence went from Qqr straight to Uv. AI models often "hallucinate" shortcuts in repetitive structures like scales, rulers, or alphabets because they prioritize the overall vibe of the background over technical accuracy.

It is a fascinating coincidence, though, especially given that "GHIST" as a histology method deals with the very thing the AI is doing: analyzing and reconstructing biological imagery through deep learning."

So, by popular demand I have now added,

Please correct the erroneous alphabet chart above the chalkboard

This resulted in the corrected picture:

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