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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%

#751
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…

Drugs work in economies of scale like everything else.

I like to write and publish books, but only because I know that several thousand people are going to buy them (yeah, humblebrag...). I wouldn't bother with them if my audience was two orders of magnitude smaller. It is just not worth the hassle.

Similarly, most programmers here probably work on projects used by thousands at least as well. Few people will put hours and energy into something that will only be used by, say, three users.

Rare diseases suffer from the same problem. The cost of development of drugs under current regulatory regime is high and in case of rare disease, cannot be amortized later over a huge set of patients. Moreover, most promising drugs actually fail in human trials, but the costs are already incurred.

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

#752

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The mRNA vaccines do not, and never have, reduce the spread of the virus from one infected person to someone else That's simply not correct.

Do you have a source for that? "fully vaccinated individuals with breakthrough infections have peak viral load similar to unvaccinated cases and can efficiently transmit infection in household settings, including to fully vaccinated contacts." [1] [1] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3...

I too can google: https://www.businessinsider.com/covid-vaccine-effectiveness-...

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

#753
post #558

I do think early treatments are important and that we have strong case studies to support the effectiveness of Ivermectin and high dosage of Vitamin D intake. https://c19early.com/

This is good information to spread. The more we can treat moderate-to-severe COVID at home, the less burden on the hospital system.

It's unbelievable to me that people can't find the positivity in studies and results like these as long as they pose a threat to their beloved "miracle" vaccines that are objectively wrecking too many people's lives with severe adverse reactions and even death, over, and over, and over again.

At some point, the horse blinders will need to be forcibly ripped off in order to help people see and understand the people right in front of them who are suffering unnecessarily as they, and their families now fight life-long conditions and grieve their losses.

It feels impossible while people clutch their pearls at the mere mention of the possibility that something _else_ exists that's sufficiently and observably effective.

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

#754
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…

Two concrete examples of this I can think of are

1) use of Psylocibin (mushrooms) assisted Congitive Behavioural Therapy for curing PTSD, depression, anxiety, etc. we have seen extremely good results from this and pharma companies could have likely pushed it much much sooner

2) Biofeedback/Neurofeedback has been around for more than a decade and is under-researched, under-insured, and under-prescribed for treatment of a lot of mental issues from anxiety to post-concussive syndrome to ADHD.

both of these can negate the need for a years or decades long reliance on SSRIs or stimulants.

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

#755
post #13

> Pfizer used data on patients who were treated within three days of symptom onset as the headline finding in its press release > 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. > Like Merck, Pfizer excluded people vaccinated against COVID-19 from its late-phase study. No…

Did they also check and exclude if they had natural immunity - COVID recovered, having antibodies?

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

#756

> 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.

Whoa, well spotted, and good news!

When I first read about molnupiravir's mode of action, my gut reaction was "cancer in a pill, no thanks"

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

#757

While this looks like potentially great news, Pfizer really needs a new Head of Making Up Drug Names. Paxlovid! Between this and ‘Comirnaty’ (the vaccine) it is clearly not their strong point.

Are all the other names taken ? "Viagra" was a nice choice tho

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

#758

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, it's the opposite. Anti-Vaxx people seem to absolutely love non-vax treatments. I don't know if the rationalization is sound, but I'm not sure it's really that. The anti-vaxx stigma pre-COVID I think has had it's toll. The notion of 'government pushing you to take something' as well. Whereas, 'you get sick, you take a pill' is an easy concept. My fear is that a lot of people won't bother with a vax if…

I think the main difference is one has to necessarily take on vaccine risk without catching covid, so you balance chance of vax complications vs chance of getting covid multiplied by chance of getting bad case of covid. So 1 * P(bad vax) vs P(getting covid) * P(bad covid case). While most of other proposed treatments are after you already got it. So P(bad side effects) vs 1 * P(bad covid case). Depending on your prio…

Well, kind of.

1) There really is no such thing as 'Vaccine Risk' in the material sense, any more than we would us language such as 'Flying Risk'. Esp. in the US where thee is no AZ vaccine, the risk is negligible.

'The Vaccine Risk' in the minds of many people isn't consistent with the reality, and it's a major communications problem.

Anti-vaxxers are internalizing and propagandizing a degree of risk that just isn't real, leading to bad health outcomes.

Sure, technically, it's a risk, but so is anything else.

2) 'No push for 100% Vaccine' - maybe not for '100%' but we really need to push hard on vaccines.

COVID is not scary because it's excessively deadly. It's scary because it's excessively viral, meaning, it's a community disease, less so an individual disease.

Stopping COVID means stoping the spread, not trying to cure people when they get it.

With 95% vaccination, R0 drops below 1 and so hospitalization rates are low, we can focus on the hard cases.

With 0% vaccination and a 85% effective drug, well, 'everyone' will get COVID, and a scary number of them will die.

The 'Best Answer' by far in a world where vaccines are very safe, very cheap, and very effective - is to get 'as many as we can' vaccinated. And then use the expensive drugs on the hard cases.

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

#759
post #749

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh? It only links to dozens of peer-reviewed journals and studies. Totally suspect. Can't win all the jab religion followers, it seems ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Well the authors could start by giving their names instead of running an anonymous page online. Then they could actually use a methodology that makes sense.

And what of the methodologies presented in the individual studies? Are they not sufficient?

Who are you, or anyone, to assume the curator / scientist / reporter who put this together is acting with negative intent when it presents a positive outlook for the use of other treatments that have manifested in good outcomes and healing?

Don't get me wrong, it's good to be skeptical, just not selectively.

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

#760

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The mRNA vaccines do not, and never have, reduce the spread of the virus from one infected person to someone else That's simply not correct.

Well I’m convinced. Case closed, you win.

California shows that unvaccinated people were 6.8 times more likely to get COVID-19 than fully vaccinated people.

https://covid19.ca.gov/state-dashboard/

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