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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%

#721

Post by tshaddox »

delecti wrote: post #669
GhettoComputers wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The fad treatments are "still medicine," but crucially are not generally approved of by the "mainstream medical establishment." This lack of approval is the key feature of these treatments.

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

#722

Post by putnambr »

tinus_hn wrote: post #93
brianmcc wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's unusual but not unheard of for trials to be stopped ahead of schedule because of this - the treatment is so clearly and substantially beneficial it's considered unethical to continue depriving the control group of the treatment. When to Stop a Clinical Trial Early for Benefit: Lessons Learned and Future Approaches: https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/CIRCHEARTFAILURE.111...

In this case the alternative to the trial would be the ‘dangerous’ option of no treatment. So that doesn’t really apply here.

How does it not apply here? Are you saying that no treatment (right now there are no standards of care for COVID-19) is not dangerous? If I recall correctly, that option is leading to people dying.

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

#723

Post by greedo »

colordrops wrote: post #532
danans wrote: post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In California, except for wearing masks in retail establishments, everything has been back to normal for months. School has been full time in person, and traffic sucks once again.

I wouldn't call it "back to normal". In addition to the mask mandates, which are more bothersome than you make out (e.g. it's pretty tiring to do cardio at the gym with a mask), there are other restrictions. Parents aren't allowed on our school campus, we don't have any in-person school events, kids get tested once a week, kids have to stay at 3 feet from each other at school, no wind instrument classes.

Isn't the point of doing cardio work to be tired? To stress your lungs and heart? That's why extreme athletes wear masks while doing cardio... I'm sure a little surgical mask isn't as difficult as this:

https://www.trainingmask.com

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

#724

Post by greedo »

motherzucker wrote: post #475
jasonpeacock wrote: post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's "hospital stress" data for the US, showing where COVID patients are overwhelming the healthcare systems: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/12/09/9443799...

Would be interesting to see how that data compares with other diseases. For instance heart disease, which is largely preventable and kills more people

I think altering your diet and lifestyle to prevent heart disease (assuming it's non-heritable) is harder than getting two shots to prevent COVID.

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

#725

Post by UnFleshedOne »

bun_at_work wrote: post #319
toyg wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah it's not really researchers that I'm worried about, it's their bosses.

Can you provide an example of a treatment people would like that 'big pharma' wouldn't produce because they couldn't make a profit on it? This is such a ridiculous argument, IMO. As a thought experiment consider something like cancer treatment. If some pharma company researcher found a way to 100% prevent or reverse cancer, why would the company hide that? In the best case, they could make a ton of money from it by s…

New antibiotics for one -- if they make a new one that has no resistances in the wild yet, doctors would avoid prescribing it as long as possible, only after all older drugs are tried, so the usage would be extremely low. Nobody wants to sink a few billion into something like that.

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

#726

Post by voltaireodactyl »

0x7E3 wrote: post #704
krapp wrote: post #692

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>What’s shocking to me is that he hasn’t been more pro-vax given we have the vaccines we do because of his administration. He made vaccinations a partisan wedge issue to such a degree that he can't afford to walk back from it if he wants to run again in 2024, similar to the Republicans' former position on Obamacare.

That seems a bit revisionist. To my knowledge, Donald Trump was always a vocal supporter of the Covid vaccine. Kamala Harris and Joe Biden were the ones sowing doubt about it - right up until they won the election. Harris, in particular, described Trump as irresponsible for advocating for Project Warpspeed and suggesting that people should take a Covid vaccine before it had gone through the full approval process. I t…

Trump didn’t make the vaccine a wedge issue, he made COVID a wedge issue by repeatedly calling it a political lie (which resulted in vaccines becoming a wedge issue).

I suspect the confusion between your perspective and that of the previous commenter is a result of the difficulty Trump experienced in trying to promote a vaccine for an illness he was himself at the same time claiming does not exist.

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

#727

Post by ivoras »

ricardobayes wrote: post #565
pezzana wrote: post #349

> Pfizer’s phase 2/3 trial randomized non-hospitalized adult COVID-19 patients who were at high risk of progressing to severe illness to receive placebo or Paxlovid, a combination of the protease inhibitors PF-07321332 and ritonavir. The efficacy analysis is based on 1,219 patients. One noteworthy feature is the newness of this drug: > PF-07321332 was developed from scratch during the current pandemic. It’s a reversi…

Is anyone familiar how this scaling up process works? To what point can it be scaled up using lab methods, and at which point does it make sense to start making it large-scale?

There was an article specifically which explained that about remdesivir in really clear language but apparently it isn't there anymore.

Here's a scholarly article on the evolution of synthesis: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8340098/

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

#728

Post by vidoc »

Turing_Machine wrote: post #708
vidoc wrote: post #574

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The cost of R&D to bring a new drug to market is around $1 billion This is one of the most well know, tired, scammy talking point big-pharma has used for decades. Hint: in the very document you linked, htere is a 'costing method' section, you might want to read it a bit more carefully and you will discover the big scam: opportunity cost, not cost.

Hmmm.... so you're arguing that it doesn't take years of time and billions of dollars to bring a drug to market? Then why aren't you (or, at least, someone ) out there developing new drugs on the cheap to undercut "Big Pharma"? Your opportunity awaits, dude.

> Hmmm.... so you're arguing that it doesn't take years of time and billions of dollars to bring a drug to market?

You just made a straw-man argument.

I posted a 2 lines comment highlighting the fact that cost and opportunity cost are two very different things, to the point that the claim that taking a drug to market costing literally billions of dollars to poor drug companies can be taken with a grain of salt.

You main take-away was that I am "arguing that it doesn't take years of time and billions of dollars to bring a drug to market".

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

#729

Post by ISL »

barbazoo wrote: post #633

> There were six hospitalizations and no deaths among the 607 patients who received Paxlovid within five days of symptom onset, compared to 41 hospitalizations and 10 deaths in the placebo cohort. I know it shouldn't be shocking but it just hit me that being in the control group here is very close to getting a death sentence. I couldn't find it in the article OP shared or the press release, but did the control group…

Sometimes the experimental drug has unexpected side-effects or is less effective than the placebo. Both sides of the trial are a gamble. It is a trial because literally nobody knows for sure what the outcome will be -- only an informed guess that the new treatment is a good idea.

When trials are extremely effective, they are sometimes halted and rolled out early. That sounds like exactly what Pfizer is attempting to do here. The company thinks that they have a clear-enough signal to be worth going to the press and preparing FDA for the EUA.

Pfizer will have made an embarrassing error if the final trial-results turn out to differ with their claims, but if they don't, then Pfizer has given a several-week head start to rolling the drug out to all patients.

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

#730

Post by thehappypm »

ImaCake wrote: post #709
fredliu wrote: post #621

> As a protease inhibitor, Paxlovid is free from the theoretical DNA-alteration risk tied to the mechanism of action of Merck’s molnupiravir. This is the line I was looking for. Not that I know how protease inhibitor works, but looks more like a traditional anti-viral approach v.s. the potentially DNA altering molnupiravir.

In brief, coronaviruses make all their proteins as one long chain and then cut it up into the appropriate pieces to form the proteins (spike etc). 3CL protease is the cutting machine and Paxlovid inhibits that.

It also means it’s going to be very difficult for the virus to be able to mutate to evade this. The protease is the beating heart.
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