university center for emerging infectious diseases, policy and research. doctor, so many questions. number one, if you have the unfortunate event in your life of getting shingles, they put you on an antiviral. i'm assuming this is the same family of drugs. and do i have the story correctly that merck's trials were so successful they called an early halt to them to try to hurry and get this available to people who need it? >> that's right, brian. i think that this is a class of drugs that works by stopping the replication of the virus. and many other things in our arsenal have tried to do that. the monoclonal antibodies have tried to do that. long weekend, patients have had trouble accessing monoclonal antibodies. the good news is we haven't seen