I thought the Mechanism of action section for this drug on Wikipedia was quite interesting:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molnupiravir#Mechanism_of_acti...
Pfizer's oral Covid-19 antiviral cuts hospitalization, death by 85%
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Re: Pfizer's oral Covid-19 antiviral cuts hospitalization, death by 85%
#212> This is a completely novel molecule... Then do we understand the risk profile of this thing? That sounds like the sort of innovation that people would want to be at the back of the queue for. Side effects don't have to happen in the next 6 months.
Yes, this makes sense. Innovative, but it will alert some people because of this.
Re: Pfizer's oral Covid-19 antiviral cuts hospitalization, death by 85%
#213Does anyone have a sense as to when US society will completely eliminate COVID measures? Is it just me or is there no clear exit criteria anymore? This will go on forever without exit criteria.
When hospitalization rates are down. In many metro areas the ICU are still full of un-vaccinated COVID patients, which means people with normal emergencies can't get a bed.
Thus, COVID precautions are necessary to reduce the rate of infection to levels that do not overwhelm the healthcare system.
And all those areas that have "returned to normal" are sending their COVID patients to regions that are still masking because they've exhausted their local ICU capacity.
Re: Pfizer's oral Covid-19 antiviral cuts hospitalization, death by 85%
#214Earlier quoted context omitted.
It would be somewhat ironic if antivaxxers latch onto this drug, because it actually has a possibility of turning out to have bad side effects that will only show up much later (increased rates of cancer), which is a major reason that is given for people not wanting to get vaccinated. Edit: Actually I was confusing this with molnupiravir; this drug is presumably perfectly safe.
Why is the probability of late-appearing side effects higher for this than for the vaccine?
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Re: Pfizer's oral Covid-19 antiviral cuts hospitalization, death by 85%
#215Earlier quoted context omitted.
If the consequence of not taking it is death, I think people would run to the front of the queue, though.
Soo, kinda like for a vaccine? (And to clarify what I am saying, even though the vaccine does prevent death, there is still considerable push back. Not sure why it will be different for this drug)
Away from the debate about who will or won't take the vaccines and why, isn't this is a huge positive for the small (but not tiny) number of people for whom vaccines don't provoke immune response (severely immunocompromised, etc)? That group are also more vulnerable to bad outcomes from Covid.
Re: Pfizer's oral Covid-19 antiviral cuts hospitalization, death by 85%
#216Lets ignore the fact that its basically ivermectin with more side effects. Except ivermectin is 30 cent per dose and not under patent..
Re: Pfizer's oral Covid-19 antiviral cuts hospitalization, death by 85%
#217Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not a binary yes-no question. It is still effective at stopping the spread of the virus, though not perfect.
What exactly you would consider "effective"? This[1] study suggests that there a brief period of significant reduction (~three months), followed by a period modest to no risk reduction, followed by a period of increased risk. This[2] study found no correlation between vaccination rates and viral spread. [1] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3949410 [2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC84…
The first study is clearly underpowered to say anything about the risk after more than around 150 days. This can be seen in figures 2 and S1, where the confidence intervals get larger than the effect size at around this point. Combining multiple age groups together also leads to a large risk of getting incorrect results due to Simpson's paradox [1]. But with so little data, the authors probably couldn't stratify for age groups without the confidence intervals exploding.
A much larger study from the US [2] shows no measurable decline in the protection against hospitalization due to COVID over more than 5 months after vaccination.
[1] https://www.covid-datascience.com/post/israeli-data-how-can-...
Re: Pfizer's oral Covid-19 antiviral cuts hospitalization, death by 85%
#218Sounds like same/similar rate as Ivermectin - if proper protocol followed.
Stop spreading disinformation. This has gone through studies showing significant positive benefits. Ivermectin has small studies with dubious methodology showing possible effects and larger studies with better methodology showing no benefit, along with substantial side-effects. https://ebm.bmj.com/content/early/2021/05/26/bmjebm-2021-111... https://www.cochranelibrary.com/content?templateType=full&ur...
I don't know if ivermectin is efficient, but I doubt it has substantial side-effects.
Your first link states that ivermectin is "proved to be safe at the conventional dose, although severe adverse effects have occasionally been reported". Occasional is not "substantial". Your second link does not work for me.
Re: Pfizer's oral Covid-19 antiviral cuts hospitalization, death by 85%
#219The title is all marketing. What’s the control?
> The rates of hospitalization or death in the Paxlovid and control arms were 1% and 6.7%, respectively, resulting in a risk reduction of 85%. Most people that get COVID don’t go to the hospital nor do they die. How much is from a null hypothesis; people who wouldn’t have complications anyway? It’s barely significant if you use 5% as the minimum, and it can still be noise. Vaccinated people are not going to have complications like this anyway. People care about not getting infected, this treatment is inferior to monoclonal antibodies and not barely significantly different from control.
Re: Pfizer's oral Covid-19 antiviral cuts hospitalization, death by 85%
#220We had reports of people who wanted to take weird-ass drugs-of-the-day just to refuse getting vaccinated. And screaming "conspiracy" when their efficacy was not confirmed to be as high as they expected. Good that we have something that actually works, bad that some assholes will use it as an excuse not to get vaxxed, completely missing the point (among others, trying to prevent something worse than Delta).
Genuine question: is it necessary to get vaxxed if - all else held the same - the cost is not significantly higher for the antiviral? Wouldn't that cut the risk down so significantly that we can safely say, "Vaccinate if you're at-risk for your own protection, and have negligible risk otherwise"? This changes the entire risk calculation.
I'm guessing you only get this pill if you're hospitalized with severe symptoms. In which case, you're still occupying hospital beds/resources, which is the main remaining threat to rational society.