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(Top left) A community health worker speaks with families about COVID-19 prevention in Afghanistan. (Top right) Students participate in an outdoor class in India. (Majority World/Getty Images) (Bottom left) A sign urges drivers to stay home during the early days of the pandemic. (Asurobson/Getty Images) (Bottome right) Catholic nuns prepare face masks for community distribution in Lusaka, Zambia. Although stopping a pandemic is something that ultimately falls on systems and governments, the last two years have shown us that individuals can make a real impact. We've seen incredible people from around the world step up to do heroic work protecting their communities--from teachers who took time to drop off class materials on their students' doorsteps to health workers who went house to house making sure everyone had the opportunity to get vaccinated. I wrote a separate post profiling several of those heroes from the African continent. You can read about them here. One area that's been a mixed bag is therapeutics. Up until the last couple of months, I was disappointed by the lack of progress we'd made on the treatment front. Remdesivir is expensive, and it just didn't have that big an effect. Dexamethasone is cheaper and helped a bit, but not enough to make a huge dent in stopping disease early. Monoclonal antibodies--which I was quite optimistic about at one point--were too complicated logistically to get out and save that many people earlier in the pandemic, and they weren't very effective against variants. The reason I'm now feeling much better about therapeutics is the recent news about two new antiviral drugs. These are the therapeutics we needed in 2020. One of them--a drug called molnupiravir from Merck--just got the seal of approval from the FDA for people at high-risk last week. It significantly reduces your chances of being hospitalized or dying from COVID-19 (although not as much as we'd initially hoped), it's relatively cheap to make, and it's an oral medication that's easy to distribute.