That's trials. : ) Each step you only get a little more clear view of safety, efficacy. If there were animal studies posted you can still correctly assert that it's no proof it will work on people.
Years ago Gilead bought a whole company just to acquire rights to a Hep C drug; a nuke. They hypothesized that another company was having good results in trials using 4 antivirals to treat Hep C. Gilead thought; lets combine the nuke with another competitors drug; an NS5a antiviral - Daclatasvir.
Gilead thought that the nuke and NS5a in combination could work as well as the other HCV pioneering partnership's treatment- Abbott (now Abbvie) and Enanta's. (that was about 2010 or 11)
Gilead paid about 11 billion for the compound and the reaction was similar to yours; it's too much money and it's not proven. I was in that final Phase 3 registration study in 2014 where Gilead was still proving dosing and duration in the middle of the decade. Conventional wisdom was that Gilead had lost it's mind and overpaid........ and was soon proven soundly incorrect.
In the case of Enanta, it was some unknown tiny company, but it did what JNJ, Merck, BMY, Roche, Sherring-Plough, Boehringer Ingelheim, et al couldn't do.
AND Enanta did it twice, in two successful launches of Hep C treatments.
There was a time that conventional wisdom said that a "nuke was necessary" to treat Hep C. And yet this small company in a partnership w/ Abbvie created a pan-genotypic Hep C 2 drug treatment with protease inhibitors they created in each - without the use of a nuke.
How many companies tried to create a Covid antiviral? Who will have the best? That same small company seems to have some of the best data I've seen. Yes, it's still early and things are not yet proven to your satisfaction. We won't have that long to wait for data.
Enanta has demonstrated *proficiency* with protease inhibitors with great success in the past.
