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Pfizer's oral Covid-19 antiviral cuts hospitalization, death by 85%

fiercebiotech.com

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Re: Pfizer's oral Covid-19 antiviral cuts hospitalization, death by 85%

#661

Post by angelzen »

jayknight wrote: post #622
nradov wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I encourage everyone eligible to get vaccinated, but at this point there is zero possibility to stop the spread. Your "team" never had a chance. We can all expect to get infected eventually. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02689-y https://www.businessinsider.com/delta-variant-made-herd-immu...

By "stop", I guess I really mean slow/reduce/flatten-the-curve, etc. It's all a game of probabilities, and I guess I'm on team lets-work-together-as-a-society-to-reduce-the-chances-of-getting-and-spreading-sars-cov2. But that's slightly less catchy.

Are there any other considerents in life, or reduce-the-chances-of-getting-and-spreading-sars-cov2 is the only metric of relevance? Can you conceptualize any possible anti-covid measure that has too little of a benefit for too high of a cost, such that we should not deploy (or mandate!) it?

Re: Pfizer's oral Covid-19 antiviral cuts hospitalization, death by 85%

#662

Post by dang »

bena wrote: post #304
dymk wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, that’s the joke

It's a bad one. Because it only works if the numbers are the same across both states. But Missouri is doing better than Kansas. So unless the virus is somehow less contagious in Missouri, it seems like Kansas is just being an idiot in this case.

Please don't take HN threads further into regional flamewar, or any flamewar. It's not what this site is for.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Pfizer's oral Covid-19 antiviral cuts hospitalization, death by 85%

#663

Post by Izkata »

acdha wrote: post #316
isolli wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The people pushing it as a COVID treatment are usually pushing prolonged usage at higher doses – they routinely dismiss studies showing no benefits as not using enough – and the documented side effects definitely happen at those levels. The lower doses used for parasite treatments also are balanced against high efficacy, whereas this just means you still have COVID along with new problems. Sorry about the link - it w…

> The people pushing it as a COVID treatment are usually pushing prolonged usage at higher doses – they routinely dismiss studies showing no benefits as not using enough – and the documented side effects definitely happen at those levels.

Uh, I have never seen that from them. All of them say the bad studies are the ones using too high a dosage, and the side effects from that dosage are why those studies have bad results.

Re: Pfizer's oral Covid-19 antiviral cuts hospitalization, death by 85%

#664

Post by ed25519FUUU »

HelloMcFly wrote: post #266
dontcare007 wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like what happened with Joe Rogan, oh wait, he recovered.

Do you believe that to be some sort of counter-argument or opposing view for anything I said? Regardless of the answer, I'm not interested in debating the wisdom of taking dog medicine in unstudied doses for an unstudied treatment with unstudied effectiveness that has a clearly documented ability to strip the lining of your intestines. You want be a trailblazer with every Facebook remedy? Be my guest.

You know IVM has been around since the 70s? People take it all of the time. It’s a very studied drug, on the list of WHO’s 100 most essential medicines. The inventor won the noble prize for it.

The cultivated animosity towards it is more of a result of propaganda. With this much money at stake, it’s easy to see who might actually be pushing that propaganda.

Re: Pfizer's oral Covid-19 antiviral cuts hospitalization, death by 85%

#665

Post by dbbk »

orra wrote: post #108
peapod91 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s correct. If a positive effect in the treatment arm of the study is found to be strong enough, it is deemed unethical to continue giving patients the placebo as control. Hence, they terminate the study and proceed to the next phase of approval

That it's unethical to continue giving half the participants a placebo makes sense. I am curious though: do they ever continue with the trial, with the patients on the actual drug? Might that be useful for monitoring rare-ish side effects, even if the drug is highly effective?

I believe they've only halted recruiting for the trial, not the trial itself. The Pfizer CEO this morning also said they're continuing with plans for two other trials starting soon, which is in people with non-co-morbidities, and to household contacts of confirmed cases.

Re: Pfizer's oral Covid-19 antiviral cuts hospitalization, death by 85%

#666

Post by wonderwonder »

bad_username wrote: post #652
wonderwonder wrote: post #640

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My guess is that the end game is when the vaccine mandate goes into effect in January. Most people will get vaccinated and those that don't wont and nothing will make them. At that point in time all that could be done has been done and life goes on. Optimally enough will be to grant some form of herd immunity or reducing the spread. I'll just get a booster when I can and go about my life. I have for all intents and p…

> Most people will get vaccinated and those that don't wont and nothing will make them. I am almost certain they will mandate the vaccination of children 5 and older.

I think that will be on a state by state basis as from my understanding the individual states set the vaccine requirements for schools. I guess the federal government could try to do something along the lines of the OSHA requirement but I think that would be a political misfire in this environment. Most of what (all) politicians do is to get reelected and I think mandating child Covid vaccination would not work in the current administrations favor especially considering what a good job the republican party has done leveraging the boogey man of critical race theory. So I am doubtful that they mandate vaccines for kids. I could be wrong though.

Re: Pfizer's oral Covid-19 antiviral cuts hospitalization, death by 85%

#667

Post by joenot443 »

barbazoo wrote: post #653
xyzzyz wrote: post #636

Earlier quoted context omitted.

10 deaths in 600 is not quite a death sentence, in my opinion. And yes, placebo group always gets current standard treatment, it would be rather wrong to do otherwise.

Not a chance I'd like to take

For sure, but in this case, not taking the chance guarantees you the "placebo", or standard care, meaning you'd be in the same boat as if you'd entered the study and received the placebo dose.

Re: Pfizer's oral Covid-19 antiviral cuts hospitalization, death by 85%

#668

Post by deworms »

rob_c wrote: post #529

Grand. Anything which stops the idiots stopping us from getting back on with our lives is good. Not for me thanks, but it gives people options to make decisions for themselves.

By now you should have noticed that you're not "getting back on with your lives" no matter how good a boy you are and how many freedoms you give up. You should have resisted this from the start, this is your choice.

Re: Pfizer's oral Covid-19 antiviral cuts hospitalization, death by 85%

#669

Post by delecti »

GhettoComputers wrote: post #357
orra wrote: post #144

I am thinking: if and when this is approved, we have to think about distribution. This drug is fantastically effective at preventing hospitalisation and death, if administered within three days of symptom onset. That gives quite a long time! But we still need to make it easy to take. Do pharmacies give it out? ER rooms? We don't want to wait until people are hospitalised; we are trying to avoid that. So when you test…

Who is the market for this? The assumption is that you give it ASAP and people want to take it. If people aren’t interested in vaccinations they may not want it either, and the vaccines are already very effective at preventing these issues.

I think skepticism of vaccines largely doesn't transfer to the broader medical field. The ineffective fad treatments (ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine) are still medicine, but are still "popular" with vaccine skeptics. It's not rational, but I think vaccine skepticism is largely not rational to begin with.

Re: Pfizer's oral Covid-19 antiviral cuts hospitalization, death by 85%

#670

Post by proc0 »

dougmwne wrote: post #597
freddealmeida wrote: post #484

I don't trust Pfizer in any case. But interesting at least. I think it needs far more study before this is simply introduced into the wild. But what do I know. We have survived for 2m years without this. I'm sure we can be fine without it.

Sure, we survived as a species, but certainly not as individuals. We see plenty of evidence of genetic bottlenecks where the human population was reduced to small numbers, quite possibly due to disease. Just within the historical period, there are legions of plagues with extremely high mortality rates, including nearly the entire native population of North America after contact with Europeans. And let’s not forget an…

But don't you think it's even a little suspicious other countries have been administering another infamous antiviral that happens to be a generic drug? I mean it's at least a coincidence that pfizer is somehow the one doing all the heavy lifting here... are they that good of a drug company? Aren't there other doctors, virologists, etc out there?

I just feel people are too quick to accept a for-profit mega-corporation as the defacto source of all things covid cure.

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