Earlier quoted context omitted.
I doubt we’ll see molnupiravir getting approved in this context now. I think the mechanism just has too much risk.
Are you a pharmaceutical research scientist?
Do I need to be to have an opinion?
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%
#822While 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.
Comirnaty sounds like Comintern (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_International) to me :-D
Re: Pfizer's oral Covid-19 antiviral cuts hospitalization, death by 85%
#823Earlier 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'd say that this will appeal to people who are covid vaccine skeptical. If you're skeptical of the mRNA vaccines, you'd probably be in favor of this treatment than the vaccines.
I had one vaccine dose with severe issues. So maybe I'm skeptical, I won't get a second or third dose. Most people in this camp will just use ivermectin. Including myself, it works and is safe.
Re: Pfizer's oral Covid-19 antiviral cuts hospitalization, death by 85%
#824> 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's interesting to learn about. Other molecules are also found to inhibit replication of 3CL protease in SARS cov-2 [1].
The UK scientific advisory group SAGE published a few months ago that combination therapy might be useful to avoid 'antiviral resistant' strains of SARS cov-2 evolving. Perhaps these 3cl protease inhibitors may be used in combination.
Re: Pfizer's oral Covid-19 antiviral cuts hospitalization, death by 85%
#825So what's their play here? That those people who refused vaccines will want to take this pill instead?
"Play"? :-) It's always the same play, they're making medicines to sell them.
And vaccinated people can get infected and suffer from serious symptoms. If the entire world were vaccinated and 0.1% of people would have serious symptoms, that would still be more than 8 million people looking for a cure.
Re: Pfizer's oral Covid-19 antiviral cuts hospitalization, death by 85%
#826> [...] patients who received Paxlovid within five days of symptom onset [...] I wonder how well it will do on people who are farther along in their COVID infection? There are a lot of people who don't get vaccinated, don't take precautions to avoid COVID, dismiss their early symptoms either because they believe COVID isn't worse than a typical cold or flu or because they think that is probably what they have, just t…
Why not just treat it at home with ivermectin if it works? It did for me for long covid.
Re: Pfizer's oral Covid-19 antiviral cuts hospitalization, death by 85%
#827Earlier quoted context omitted.
I live in Kansas and have basically forgotten COVID is a thing. The people who wanted to get vaccinated like me have and those who haven’t, haven’t. Nobody asks about it and no businesses have any sort of mask requirements. Half of the people at the grocery store wear masks and the other half don’t. Everyone seems to be getting along. Next door in Kansas City Missouri I stopped at a gas station and an employee was sh…
Pretty much the same story in South Carolina. Outside retail workers, mask usage in my hyper local area is about 2%. Life has been basically completely normal since June 2020.
Where in South Carolina are you?
Re: Pfizer's oral Covid-19 antiviral cuts hospitalization, death by 85%
#828Earlier quoted context omitted.
Researchers in pharma are working extremely hard and almost always in good faith. I know this is probably tongue-in-cheek but it's not true.
Yeah it's not really researchers that I'm worried about, it's their bosses.
You ascribe far more rationality to the process of developing drugs than is actually applied.
Pharma mostly avoids low-profit avenues, but at least partly because that would be a good way to go out of business. However, to suggest that they intentionally suppress researchers with the goal of reducing costs seems a bit far-fetched.
Re: Pfizer's oral Covid-19 antiviral cuts hospitalization, death by 85%
#829If you take an antiviral like this, do you still develop a good immune response to reinfection? I wonder because almost everyone who might end up needing this isn't vaccinated (based on hospitalization rates) so I hope that at the end they also end up having some immunity to catching it again at least. In the moment of course it is better to use than not.
You should -- protease inhibitors inhibit replication, but existing viruses should be more than enough to generate a durable response in most individuals.
If I remember correctly, it’s not Covid that kills you directly , but a runaway immune response. What was the name… Cytokine storm?
Re: Pfizer's oral Covid-19 antiviral cuts hospitalization, death by 85%
#830Does 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.
I live in Kansas and have basically forgotten COVID is a thing. The people who wanted to get vaccinated like me have and those who haven’t, haven’t. Nobody asks about it and no businesses have any sort of mask requirements. Half of the people at the grocery store wear masks and the other half don’t. Everyone seems to be getting along. Next door in Kansas City Missouri I stopped at a gas station and an employee was sh…
Well, apparently Kansas is passing the buck to other places: https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=29119688&goto=item%3Fi...