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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%

#881

Post by swader999 »

tsol wrote: post #857
swader999 wrote: post #826

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not just treat it at home with ivermectin if it works? It did for me for long covid.

Because theres no reason to believe it does. Firstly the study that Ivermectin-for-covid is based on in vitro(cell-in-petri-dish) studies of rhesus monkey liver cells[1]. Additionally. Rhesus monkeys have differing bodies sizes and in order to get an equivalent dose in humans would require overdosing on ivermectin, which can and has lead to death. Ivermectin targets the host nuclear transport importin α/β1 heterodime…

Well it felt like I never really got over it. Aside from a brief period of fever, everything else stayed until ivermectin. Headache, fatigue, sob, cough, sense of smell issues, brain fog, all kinds of erratic heart problems. There's a lot of speculation that long covid results from the virus migrating into the body and organs where it persists. This makes sense with what I experienced. Symptoms I've never had before went away within hours and cleared up completely within days of starting it.

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

#882

Post by BurningFrog »

toyg wrote: post #76
savant_penguin wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And it's here in _two_ years

One one side: great job, pharma industry! We're gonna live forever! On the other side: what are you folks not curing, with your magic powers, just because you know you won't be able to make a buck from it...?

If it was cheaper to bring a drug through the regulatory process, obviously more drugs would be produced.

The cost explosion for these things are mainly the responsibility of US regulators.

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

#883

Post by lliamander »

oblio wrote: post #808
Redoubts wrote: post #790

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Operation Warp Speed is, to me, an indication of the power of government "intertia". We call this the Deep State

No need to use a conspiracy theory name for it. The truth is that any government needs a ton of people to operate properly and you can't change all of them upon election. Actually, scratch that, you can sort of do that every election/change of government. Do you know where they do that? Failed states. Failed states change most if not all the government employees upon regime change, to put people from the new regime i…

It's not really a conspiracy theory though, it's just the reality that much/most of the power of the government is in the hands of unelected bureaucrats. That doesn't imply the bureaucrats are conspiring.

And that's not necessarily a bad thing (for the reasons you describe) but there's a fundamental deceit going on if the president can't actually control that bureaucracy (because people assume that he can).

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

#884

Post by Madmallard »

HWR_14 wrote: post #372
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…

>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…

The Latest article in BMJ about the failures in scientific integrity in the pfizer trials are a likely consequence of your last paragraph I would guess.

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

#885

Post by throwaway821909 »

oblio wrote: post #822
rsynnott wrote: post #324

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.

Comirnaty sounds like Comintern ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_International ) to me :-D

I always think "comorbidity"

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

#886

Post by refurb »

semi-extrinsic wrote: post #702
sokoloff wrote: post #679

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

Terrible take. Your first source vaguely tries to estimate promotional spending (not advertising as you deceitfully claim). Promotional spend has a positive ROI (or you wouldn’t do it). So spending $1B in promotion gets your $1B+ in sales (it’s self funding).

Plus stock buybacks and dividends are being criticized? Returning money to investors is “bad”? Who do you think provides capital for drug development? The Grenadier Guards?

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

#887

Post by refurb »

Retric wrote: post #870
anamax wrote: post #846

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mone…

Huh? Per unit dispensing of generic opioids dwarfs branded opioids.

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

#888

Post by refurb »

thehappypm wrote: post #821
caleb-allen wrote: post #783

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you a pharmaceutical research scientist?

Do I need to be to have an opinion?

You seem awfully confident in your opinion for not having any deep knowledge of the area.

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

#889

Post by effie »

pfisherman wrote: post #847
nkozyra wrote: post #733

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This lack of approval is the key feature of these treatments. Lack of approval + length of use as medicine. There's a narrative that drug X has been used for 50 years (despite what it's used for) and therefore the pharma industry is uninterested in its success because they can't get rich off of it. The latter is a common thread, along the lines of "what THEY don't want you to know."

But this makes absolutely no sense. Plenty of previously approved drugs, such as anticoagulants and dexamethasone, are part of the current standard of care; and their effectiveness has unambiguously been borne out by the data with multiple independent studies / analyses that all agree. So why are THEY for these but against ivermectin? Of course the whole idea of THEY is nutty. The idea that there is this level of coo…

You only make it ridiculous, it's actually really simple. Bureaucrats in agencies have their procedures and their agenda. Very little coordination is needed to ignore some controversial medication, associated with poor countries and antivaxers, when there are other things they can appear to be working on.

Many people sick with COVID are not getting this "standard of care" you suggest exists. Just tylenol and good luck. So those other drugs are not very far from ivermectin in terms of accessibility. All effective drugs are controlled and access is not given to the broad public, only to doctors and pharmacists, and many of these gatekeepers keep them from the sick people. You have to be lucky and have a good doctor who cares about you, not just about following what government agencies tell him to do. Then he may give both "unproblematic" stuff like heparines and also more "controversial" stuff like ivermectin.

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

#890

Post by rbut »

prox wrote: post #829
lekanwang wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Early treatment means that the virus doesn't replicate from the upper respiratory tract down to the lungs, where yes the cytokine storm can kill you.
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