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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%

#861

Post by Afton »

anamax wrote: post #846
semi-extrinsic wrote: post #702

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pharma companies in the US spend about twice as much on advertising as they do on R&D [1]. Recent data compiled by the House Oversight Committee shows the biggest pharma companies spent $56 billion more on stock buybacks and dividends than they did on R&D over the past five years [2]. Very little of the ridiculous prices that US citizens pay for medicine (directly or via insurance) actually goes towards R&D. [1] http…

Advertising includes drug samples given to doctors, which many/most of them give to patients who can't afford said drugs. How many of them are you willing to cut off?

In order to make the drug more affordable? I mean... all of them? Maybe I'm not understanding your point?

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

#862

Post by hellbannedguy »

sokoloff wrote: post #679
HWR_14 wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Less than two years from lab to clinic is highly unusual. I assume like most other COVID vaccines/treatments, the timeline is shrunk by going straight to more expensive phases of the trial instead of having preliminary ones of escalating cost and confidence. Or at least prepping for them. For instance, all the vaccines started setting up commercial production around the same time they started trials, because it's no…

This has interesting implications when we consider how much money drug companies “should” be paid for inventing important new life-saving medicines. I frequently hear/read complaints of "that's outrageous [that this medicine costs $X]!" Well, maybe it is; maybe it isn't, but if you make sure it costs $X/100, I can be pretty sure you'll get less drug R&D.

That's fine for new drugs.

Not for generic drugs.

And let us buy our meds out of country.

(And buying out generic drug manufactures should other drug companies in order to decrease competition is not cool either.)

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

#863

Post by tsol »

ganzuul wrote: post #858
phh wrote: 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…

10 deaths with placebo... Medical ethics are confusing. Maybe this field needs more oversight. Especially on the corporate level.

Patients enrolling in a clinical trial know they may get the placebo control. It wouldnt be more ethical to give it to all patients as in the case the medication does have a side effects you are only guaranteeing everyone gets hurt.

As House put it--

>Just to shortcut this discussion.. People should not be testing drugs because they're desperate. But, people won't test drugs unless they're desperate. We need drugs to save children and puppies, ergo we need desperate people, ergo welfare kills sick children.

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

#864

Post by danans »

skrbjc wrote: post #619
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.

Where are you in CA? Here in the Bay Area, at least East Bay, you have to wear a mask to go shopping. >90% of people at the parks are wearing masks, we can't go into the daycare to pick up our son and the nanny wears a mask all day, you can't sit in a restaurant unless you show your id and paperwork proving you have a vaccine. Heck, I see kids and adults riding their bikes or skateboarding without a helmet or any pro…

> Not sure what "normal" meant to you before, but it's definitely not any definition of normal to me,

I'm in the East Bay, and most of what you have described - people at the park wearing masks, riding bikes or skateboards with masks, nannies wearing masks - are voluntary behaviors not mandated by any authority.

Why does it matter to you what measures others take to protect themselves from the virus voluntarily, and which is totally within their personal liberty to do? Does it offend your sensibilities somehow? Should they not be wearing masks to make you feel like things are "normal" per your definition?

The other cases you raise -retail, restaurant, and daycare - all have very specific risks either due to density or because unvaccinated children are present.

It is "normal" now because I can go shopping or to a restaurant, have a drink at my neighborhood bar, take my kids to school, fly somewhere on vacation, have a gathering in my house, attend public events (Halloween was huge in my neighborhood) - everything I did before the pandemic - with the tiny inconvenience of getting vaccinated and wearing a mask when indoors in public.

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

#865

Post by gpcr1949 »

dekhn wrote: post #777

Damn, the structure has 3 fluorines. This particular structure is stable, but in general, fluorine chemistry is tricky. Obligatory classic: https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/things-i-won-t-wor...

trifluoroacetyl is a pretty stable substituent, as far as the fluorines go. trifluoromethyl as a substituent is a classic "medicinal chemist's favorite" and will not be labile. for example: efavirenz, fluoxetine, celecoxib all have a TFM. It's true fluorine chemistry is generally tricky, including some organofluorine chemistry, on the other hand in this case trifluoroacetic acid, trifluoroacetyl chloride etc are commercially available, affordable and common so no issue to make the trifluoroacetyl amide at some point. anyway for me this is a really nice "medchem" friendly compound.. i like the little oddball bicyclo[3.1.0]hexane ringsystem in there (the part that looks like a pentagon fused with a triangle).

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

#866

Post by orra »

claytongulick wrote: post #781
orra wrote: post #717

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not so certain. People who for whatever irrational reason don't want an mRNA vaccine can take a viral vector vaccine. Yet they don't.

I suppose some people would lump me in with "anti-vaxxer" because I don't want to get the Covid vaccine. I'm not anti-vax, btw. I have a medical condition that requires me to receive regular vaccination against several diseases, and I'm strict about doing that on time. I've made a calculated decision in the case of this specific vaccine based on that fact that I've now had Covid twice (first time was a bit nasty, sec…

> My decision against getting the vaccine was entirely risk based.

You say that, but you ended up catching COVID twice. Was the second time post the availability of vaccines?

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

#867

Post by dekhn »

whymauri wrote: post #792
dekhn wrote: post #777

Damn, the structure has 3 fluorines. This particular structure is stable, but in general, fluorine chemistry is tricky. Obligatory classic: https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/things-i-won-t-wor...

Exactly what I was thinking, especially for an entirely novel molecule. I wonder how novel the scaffold is. Whichever med chemist led this initiative is an artist -- amazing job.

it's not hard to find other molecules with similar scaffolds. Simply train an unsupervised network (autoencoder) over SMILES strings taken from ZINC. Convert your molecule of interest to a vector using the encoder, then find N nearest neighbors and decode. Those molecules will likely have similar scaffolds.

There are other methods, graph substructure similarity is common. More to your actual question, it was derived from a previous attempt (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lufotrelvir) which has a very similar structure, and I wasn't able to find prior information by doing a little literature searching to see if there are other similar compounds.

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

#868

Post by UnFleshedOne »

jollybean wrote: post #758
UnFleshedOne wrote: post #736

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

All risks are relative, yes. Covid risk is also negligible for some groups (like small children), it is very likely very comparable or smaller than the tiny vaccine risk. There is a lot of propagandizing degrees of risk across all tribes -- democrats wildly overestimating risk of hospitalization and republicans wildly underestimating it.

But what about 75% vaccination (lots of countries are there already or very close) and 85% effective drug? How much effort much be spent on hunting down every last antivaxxer and how many side effects of that are acceptable? (like destroying public support for vaccine mandates in general, creating nice shiny tools for the next wannabe authoritarian, etc)

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

#869

Post by HWR_14 »

lettergram wrote: post #584
HWR_14 wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Presumably that means you’ll have that risk, plus additional unknown risk. That's a bad argument. This makes COVID less severe, which in turn makes the long-term affects less severe. Things in medicine are rarely binary.

We don’t actually know if it makes the long term risk less severe or more severe. We don’t have the data.

Sure. We also don't know if it will give you superpowers. I mean, we have logic and the history of similar things that gives us good ideas. And the fact that the risks grow because the immune response means a shorter immune response is likely to be less severe long term. But yeah, technically there is no study there yet.

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

#870

Post by Retric »

anamax wrote: post #846
semi-extrinsic wrote: post #702

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pharma companies in the US spend about twice as much on advertising as they do on R&D [1]. Recent data compiled by the House Oversight Committee shows the biggest pharma companies spent $56 billion more on stock buybacks and dividends than they did on R&D over the past five years [2]. Very little of the ridiculous prices that US citizens pay for medicine (directly or via insurance) actually goes towards R&D. [1] http…

Advertising includes drug samples given to doctors, which many/most of them give to patients who can't afford said drugs. How many of them are you willing to cut off?

Those free samples very much make treatment less affordable. They don’t need to hand out samples when their treatment is the only option, they need to advertise to out compete generics.

It’s shockingly effective, look at say prescriptions for patented opioids vs the vast numbers of equally effective generics. Doctors are extremely susceptible to advertising just like most people, the difference is it’s not their money being spent.

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