Reuters chose to debonk itself. Nowhere in Kowa's press release do they state that they're doing 'non clinical research'. In fact they state repeatedly that they're conducting stage 3 clinical trials on the drug and that they're confident it has the same antiviral effect on Omicron Covid that they had confirmed with other strains.
In current year the Covidian bugmen would happily pass up an effective and safe treatment rather than hand a W to non believers.
Reminder that booster dose vaccination efficacy is based almost exclusively on invitro studies, specifically the Pfizer study that didn't test against actual Omicron Covid. There have been no phased blind clinical trials on 3rd and 4th dose vaccinations. All they've done is take plasma samples from the boosted and exposed them to an Omicron mimic, oh and measure antibody titres because as we know moar antibodies is good, By that standard Ivermectin should be approved right now. These people have no shame.