[WJW]

From the wikipedia page you linked:

> Molnupiravir is indicated for the treatment of mild-to-moderate coronavirus disease (COVID-19) in adults with positive results of direct SARS-CoV-2 viral testing, and who are at high risk for progression to severe COVID-19.[1][5]

So after the risk of creating mutations in the Covid virus has been assessed and weighed against the chances of patients just outright dying due to not having this medicine available, the board full of medical professionals trained in this matter voted 13 to 10 that they thought the risk was acceptable.

[nerdponx]

Is the risk different from the risks of antibiotics and antifungals with respect to creating resistant strains?

[WJW]

Well, first off "normal" antibiotics don't kill viruses so that kinda makes it different from the start. But even then, most antibiotics kill bacteria etc through disrupting their cellular processes and leaves the DNA mostly alone. Resistance against antibiotics is created through natural evolution; those bacteria that can survive better in an environment where antibiotics will reproduce more than their cousins which can't.

OTOH, Molnupiravir works by: (quoting from Wikipedia again)

> [it] exerts its antiviral action through introduction of copying errors during viral RNA replication.

So it deliberately stops virus reproduction by introducing errors in RNA copying. The vast majority of time this just makes the virus nonfunctional, but it is technically not impossible that it creates a viable mutated strain. This mutated strain may or may not be worse than the original virus. It is not unsimilar to how `cat /dev/urandom | bash` just MIGHT start off with `rm -rf /` and delete everything, but usually it will just create a crash because the random bytes don't parse into a valid bash command.