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

fiercebiotech.com

961–970 of 1001 posts

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

#961

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first three days of symptoms for an anti-vaxxer are obviously just a flu, because covid is fake. It's not covid until they're hooked up to a machine...

There are many who won't even get a test now, to check if it's COVID. They ride it out, and won't know if they just had a flu, cold, or COVID. And thus it seems we've currently plateaued in case counts in the US :(

How does knowing the name of your infection help you? If I'm sick I'm going to stay home and rest, not run to a test clinic out of pure curiosity.

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

#962

So no we have the Pfizer vaccine (which I got) who cuts the risk of both catching the virus and the risk of severe complication by a lot (forgot the number but it's big) and in addition to that we now have Pfizer oral medication that can be given to positive cases and which reduces both hospitalization and death risk by 85%. When can life go back to normal?

What's so different now exactly? I can go to restaurants, the store, the movies, fly. I gotta wear a mask indoors to some degree, so I guess we're at like 99% normal.

It's impossible to plan anything further than 2 weeks ahead with a relative certainty that things will go through. How is that 99% normal? The uncertainties around things considered "normal" is extremely high. Wearing a mask is not normal, yet still very common (and mandated again as of today in The Netherlands).

Going through extensive testing and requiring proof of vaccinations for a thing as simple as going to the zoo is also not 99% normal. I have two trips abroad planned in the next 3 months, yet chances are high that I won't go to either due to external circumstances.

People with potentially life threatening health issues such as brain tumors are seeing their treatments postponed. Excess deaths are still very high in many countries, even with high vaccination rates.

Things are 1% normal, not 99% normal.

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

#963
post #614

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've noticed that, Waitroses and doctor's surgeries seem to be the last bastion of English mask-wearing. I wonder what the correlation actually is fundamentally? Waitrose's clientele are wealthier and therefore older and more concious of COVID?

It's virtue signaling

This gets thrown around so much now I automatically dismiss it as a lazy complaint.

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

#965
post #144

I am thinking: if and when this is approved, we have to think about distribution. This drug is fantastically effective at preventing hospitalisation and death, if administered within three days of symptom onset. That gives quite a long time! But we still need to make it easy to take. Do pharmacies give it out? ER rooms? We don't want to wait until people are hospitalised; we are trying to avoid that. So when you test…

Hope anti vaxxer will take it. To free up hospitals.

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

#966
post #873

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm fairly certain that all of those compounds derive from some fluorine gas that was incorporated into the source molecules. The molecule I worked with in grad school, 5FU, contains a fluorine, it's a very effective anticancer drug which ultimately came from fluroacetyl which is highly toxic. In fact most of the molecules I worked with in grad school that had fluorine were toxic specifically because of fluorine. Not…

I think I get what you mean but I don't agree on all fronts. 1. that compounds derive from some difficult to handle gas is only a problem for the process chemists. In this case because the TFA-based precursor is available this is not a problem. Though technically, the production of that commercially available TFA will probably have involved F2. 2. Though indeed there are quite a few toxic compounds that incorporate f…

ok that's a good reply, have an upvote

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

#967
post #867

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Right, it's not technically difficult to match a scaffold -- you can probably parallelize a big RDKit job, but it's nontrivial to scale to a gigascale set. And, like you mentioned, there's rule-based substructure matching (sometimes easier for those willing to venture a bit outside SMILES). Anyways, it was more a curiosity question -- thank you for the details on Lufotrelvir!

you wouldn't run a big rdkit job, you'd just featurize all your molecules and then do vector comparisons. lots less CPU but a big risk of false negatives.

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

#968
post #691

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Operation Warp Speed is, to me, an indication of the power of government "intertia". Trump changed a lot of things, and while an uncomfortable amount of the U.S. government seems to run on "tradition" that isn't actually law, after 4 years of unchecked assault it was only at the very end that it really got crazy. Warp speed is the work of career guys. Not even Fauchi -- he was important, but these ideas are put toget…

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

Stable Western nations have career bureaucrats that continue working their office regardless of which political party is at helm. This brings expertise and continuity and has nothing to do with deep state. A new minister will assign new goals but retain the old team that has the best understanding available in their specific field.

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

#969
post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no bad propaganda when it comes to persuading people to get vaccinated. The alternative is the mess we're in now because people hesitate to get vaccinated. This study uses HIV to model sars mutation. HIV is highly mutagenic : https://www.google.com/search?q=hiv+mutation+rate&oq=hiv+mutation+rate&aqs=chrome.0.0i512l6j0i22i30l4.1834j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 sar-cov2 is less mutagenic than the flu and far le…

All those countries are small aside from China whose vaccine is not very effective and people with high East Asian ancestry have natural mutations against COVID. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2818-3 You say vaccination or serious measure, which is the truth? Could a mutation not occur elsewhere and infect a densely populated area? There isn’t evidence that the places most affected were the origins of the…

That article shows a clear correlation between 2 locations with large populations that are susceptible to high risk of severe covid and 2 of the main mutations delta (india) and alpha (uk).

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

#970

So no we have the Pfizer vaccine (which I got) who cuts the risk of both catching the virus and the risk of severe complication by a lot (forgot the number but it's big) and in addition to that we now have Pfizer oral medication that can be given to positive cases and which reduces both hospitalization and death risk by 85%. When can life go back to normal?

Old normal is gone and will never come back - instead we are building a new normal, but it will take at least another year or two to solidify. It probably will be similar to what we had before. It's kind of like after 9/11 - we wanted things back to normal, too, but that old normal never returned.
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