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Medicine

Pfizer Says COVID Pill Cuts Risk of Death or Hospitalization by 89%, Citing Interim Results (axios.com) 112

Posted by msmash from the moving-forward dept.
Pfizer's oral antiviral drug was found to reduce the risk of hospitalization or death from COVID-19 by 89%, according to interim results from a mid-to-late-stage study announced by the company on Friday. From a report: Antiviral drugs can be a key pandemic-fighting tool, as not everyone will get vaccinated against the virus and it may take years to fully inoculate people in certain countries -- particularly given current gaps in global vaccine supplies. Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla said in a statement that these findings from the phase 2/3 study marked "a real game-changer in the global efforts to halt the devastation of this pandemic." Pfizer's antiviral pill, PAXLOVID (PF-07321332), was developed specifically to treat COVID-19, by blocking activity of the main enzyme the virus needs to multiply. This was co-administered with a low dose of ritonavir, which is widely used in combination treatments for HIV infection.
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Pfizer Says COVID Pill Cuts Risk of Death or Hospitalization by 89%, Citing Interim Results More

Pfizer Says COVID Pill Cuts Risk of Death or Hospitalization by 89%, Citing Interim Results

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  • Is it (Score:4, Funny)

    by ArchieBunker ( 132337 ) on Friday November 05, 2021 @10:51AM (#61959983)

    Sold at Tractor Supply Company?

  • very few details (Score:3)

    by Klaxton ( 609696 ) on Friday November 05, 2021 @10:53AM (#61959989)
    This sounds promising, but almost no details whatsoever other than it is a protease inhibitor. The Merck anti-viral requires that it be taken within five days of symptom onset. It is fairly expensive at $700 per course of treatment, which makes it hard to justify giving it to everyone who tests positive. So I'll be curious as to the cost of this one.

    • Re:very few details (Score:5, Insightful)

      by ArchieBunker ( 132337 ) on Friday November 05, 2021 @11:18AM (#61960071)

      What's funny (or sad) about this whole ordeal is monoclonal antibody treatment is still experimental and $2100 a treatment. Meanwhile the vaccine to prevent or lessen symptoms is free at every pharmacy.

      • But, but why should I get a free treatment when I can pay the equivalent of my monthly rent, car, and food budgets? Why do you hate freedom? :P
      • It's not free - your taxes are paying for it.

        • Re:very few details (Score:5, Insightful)

          by AleRunner ( 4556245 ) on Friday November 05, 2021 @12:34PM (#61960289)

          It's not free - your taxes are paying for it.

          Given that the alternative is a bunch of cretins getting the virus and then going bankrupt leaving millions of dollars of medical fees which the hospitals end up having to get back from other patients and the public, I suspect every American taxpayer saves a huge amount on just the extra people that take it because it's free. It really is time to impose a tax on anti-vax and anti-mask stupidity.

          • It's not free - your taxes are paying for it.

            Given that the alternative is a bunch of cretins getting the virus and then going bankrupt leaving millions of dollars of medical fees which the hospitals end up having to get back from other patients and the public, I suspect every American taxpayer saves a huge amount on just the extra people that take it because it's free. It really is time to impose a tax on anti-vax and anti-mask stupidity.

            Sure you want to go that way? How about a fat tax?

            • Sure you want to go that way? How about a fat tax?

              If there's somebody with contagious fat disease spreading it to the rest of society through their own deliberate stupidity then tax them to hell. In fact, I'd probably go lots further.

        • It's not free - your taxes are paying for it.

          And at around $20 still a small fraction of the alternative.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by sjames ( 1099 )

          Yep, about $18.

      • You do realize that monoclonal antibody treatment iis used on vaccinated people that catch COVID also, right?

        How about we stop trying to dunk on political opponents and celebrate any technical achievement that works against COVID, at whatever cost.

        The awesome thing is that these COVID vaccines and treatments should be able to just work or be tailored to any virus, so we as a civilization are really making some good strides forward here that could help a lot in the future as new viruses occur, by whatever me

        • It's still not an excuse to avoid vaccination.

          The steady drumbeat of hospitalizations being dominated by the unvaxed makes it increasingly obvious that the price being paid for taking a phony stand for "personal choice" around vaccination is pretty fucking high.

          Maybe the Republican party will hand out post-mortem "hero" medals to the numbskulls who squawked about their personal choices in not getting vaccinated and died for the cause.

      • What's funny (or sad) about this whole ordeal is monoclonal antibody treatment is still experimental and $2100 a treatment. Meanwhile the vaccine to prevent or lessen symptoms is free at every pharmacy.

        But you see, the free stuff is just a ploy by "Big Pharma" to get you hooked on the stuff. Whereas, the $2,100 monoclonal antibody treatment [miamiherald.com], NOT made by Big Pharma, is to pay back your political donors [nbcnews.com].

        * For those keeping track, the NOT part is being facetious.

      • What's funny (or sad) about this whole ordeal is monoclonal antibody treatment is still experimental and $2100 a treatment. Meanwhile the vaccine to prevent or lessen symptoms is free at every pharmacy.

        That's a false narrative. Monocolonal antibody treatments are provided free of charge by the federal government. [wbrc.com] Just like the vaccine.

        The big problem with monocolonal antibody treatments is they are difficult to administer. They are given intravenously. That means an infected and infectious, person has to be given the treatment by a medical professional. It's labor intensive, and creates risk to the medical professional.

        This pill can be delivered to a doorstep without human contact, and self admin

        • If you chose to pay $2100 in taxes rather than $20 (cost of the Pfizer vaccine) to get the same result you're still stupid regardless of the parent's false narrative.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by HiThere ( 15173 )

        Well, one reason the monocolonal antibody treatment is still experimental is that it didn't work very well. Not nearly as well as they hoped it would. So they stopped pushing it.

        That was a real surprise to me, but several "experts in the field" didn't seem surprised at all. Their consensus was "biology is hard, and most things we try fail".

  • Should be an easier way ...

  • I saw someone who lives near me for the first time in a couple of months a few hours ago. She is in her late 40's or early 50's and has had the two Pfizer shots. Two months ago she was away - with her husband and adult children - visiting family.
    She knows how she got infected - she hugged a young child in her extended family. Her husband and kids are fine, but both she and her sister were really hit hard, she herself still has several of the symptoms - such as loss of taste - two months later.

    Obviously I

  • I think there was too much initial focus (as in funding and development time and labor) on vaccines. We now have multiple vaccines, all performing about the same as one another, and very few actual treatments for COVID.

    IMO, there was a gamble on vaccines by CDC, WHO, and the powers that be, with the assumption that a vaccine would prevent a person from getting COVID at all, and thus stop the spread of COVID via herd immunity. We have since learned that many people who we thought weren't contracting COVID w

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      I think it's unlikely it's taken this long to develop these treatments we're hearing about now. I think pharma realized there is a big market for them since the vaccines aren't resulting in herd immunity, and so they're finally getting around to developing drugs to actually combat COVID infections.

      Drug development doesn't work like that. Vaccines are relatively easier to develop because you plug the new pathogen into every vaccine platform you've developed previously and run some tests to see which one works best (assuming any of the existing known platforms work; sometimes we have to develop new techniques which then it takes a lot longer). And we even had a head start on that because the virus is similar enough to SARS that using the insights from our trial and error on making a SARS vaccine meant

    • A vaccine is a way to get your immune system to do the heavy lift, an antiviral is to break only the proteins that the virus depends on without breaking the host's proteins, which is far harder. Add to that that a vaccine has a long term protective effect and an antiviral does not and it is easy to see why the former is the better bet.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by epine ( 68316 )

      I think there was too much initial focus (as in funding and development time and labor) on vaccines.

      This is completely nuts. Off the chart nuts. Beyond Elon Musk's darkest inner SpaceY fantasy venture to colonize Alpha Centauri nuts.

      Given the economic stakes involved—a supersized Big Gulp slice out of net global GDP with a dismal multiyear prognosis—we invested less in every possible medical direction than a rational ROI calculation would have had us do.

      Partly this has to do with a weird neolibe

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by HiThere ( 15173 )

        You are wrong. The govenment has sufficient knowledge in January to know that they should have taken COVID seriously.

        Whether your "zeta" is a possibility is something we still don't know. It could show up tomorrow, or it may be impossible for this virus. We can't prove either way. COVID doesn't seem to mutate anywhere nearly as easily as influenza. Partially this is because of proofreading enzymes, but possibly most of the alternatives are unviable. OTOH, it's worth noting that several of the non-vacc

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mbkennel ( 97636 )

      > I'm curious if we would be in a better position now if some of those billions of dollars and huge amount of scientific effort to develop one or two of those vaccines were directed at COVID treatments instead.

      Really? There seem to be hundreds of trials for COVID therapeutics of both existing and novel molecules.

      https://www.raps.org/news-and-... [raps.org]

      I'll cut and paste from the first few pages of distinct therapeutics

      Molnupiravir (MK-4482)
      Evusheld (tixagevimab and cilgavimab; AZD7442)
      BRII-196/BRII-198
      Heparin

    • I think there was too much initial focus (as in funding and development time and labor) on vaccines. We now have multiple vaccines, all performing about the same as one another, and very few actual treatments for COVID.

      Hogwash. You don't stop a disease from spreading with treatment, and developing an effective antiviral is significantly harder than developing a vaccine which is incidentally why there are so petty few of them out there.

      I'm curious if we would be in a better position now if some of those billions of dollars and huge amount of scientific effort to develop one or two of those vaccines were directed at COVID treatments instead.

      We would not. Firstly I want you to pick a winner, but without the benefit of hindsight. Let's go back to early 2020. Maybe defund Pfizer and pour your money into Sanofi instead? Who is Sanofi? Well one of the many who failed to produce an effective vaccine. Or maybe you want people testing

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by HiThere ( 15173 )

        Sorry, but effective treatments also help keep contagious diseases from spreading. I'm not talking about symptomatic treatments, I agree that those don't really help.

    • Vaccines are critical because we don't know who will get hit hard. And this is a virus that will infect nearly everybody eventually.

      The vaccines do substantially reduce transmission still. Estimate are around 50-80% effectiveness at preventing infection. Not as good as they are at preventing hospitalization but still very very very good at reducing community spread.

      But let's say the average price of a novel treatment is $1,000. If we just gave a treatment to everybody over the age of 50 that's 114 mil

    • Vaccines are easy (relatively speaking). Treatments for viruses are hard. This is not like bacteria where a simple antibiotic is easy to produce.

      Antivirals are difficult. The main line of defense in modern medicine is a vaccine.

    • Just here to point some elements that you might be overlooking in your reasoning.
      If there's a single take home message:
      always remember that in biology and medecine there are no 0%, no 100%, "always"/"never".
      Evreything is just increase/decreasing risks/chance (most often multiple at the same time).
      Taking decision in medecine and biology is about finding the fine balance between all those to increase the chances of the outcome you want to happen.

      I think there was too much initial focus (as in funding and development time and labor) on vaccines. We now have multiple vaccines, all performing about the same as one another,

      Currently there are a lot of vaccines, because to increase our c

  • They all need to change their policy to say that if you died from covid, and did not have vaccine, then no payout.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by ebvwfbw ( 864834 )

      They all need to change their policy to say that if you died from covid, and did not have the vaccine, then no payout.

      Then you have people like my wife that is taking cancer treatments and can't have the vaccine. It would kill her. She's barely alive as it is while under treatment. We've been paying into her death insurance for over 30 years. In fact, she nearly died last June. So if she died and happened to have covid was that really the cause? I'm sure an insurance company would want to say that so they can weasel out of a payout.

      It's also a bad policy. Where would it end? You suffer from diabetes and allow the sugar lev

  • And Phillip Morris says Marlboro is the healthy choice.

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