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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%

#331
post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From what I understand it's taken once an infection is already established. Maybe it's easier to convince the "skeptics" under those circumstances to take potentially life-saving medicine.

Sure, those same skeptics, once they're sick, happily line up for an hourlong infusion of experimental monoclonal antibodies, which have similarly unknown "long-term side effects" or whatever they're worried about. It turns out that long-term side effects (which are a possibility with every livesaving medical intervention- what are the long-term side effects of CPR?) are a lot less scary compared to short-term death.

[deleted]

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

#332
> compared to 41 hospitalizations and 10 deaths in the placebo cohort

This makes me weirdly sad. Can you imagine entering the trial for a long sought drug against a deadly disease that turn out to be working, and end up in the control group? I know that there's more to it (it's necessary, they knew, it could have not worked, plainly be nocive, etc.) but it's like being unlucky twice in a row and die out of that while having received the real thing would have saved you

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

#333
> [...] 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 treat it at home with vitamins and ivermectin if they do anything at all about it, and don't end up going to a doctor or hospital until they are having so much trouble breathing they have to go to the emergency room.

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

#334
post #19

I think it’s hard to overstate what a big deal this is for science. This is a completely novel molecule that appears effective as an antiviral. This would a huge achievement for the field of drug design, and will hopefully lead to all kinds of great medicine.

> completely novel molecule

Can someone please ELI5 what makes this unique from others?

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

#335

Does 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.

When hospitalization rates are down. In many metro areas the ICU are still full of un-vaccinated COVID patients, which means people with normal emergencies can't get a bed. Thus, COVID precautions are necessary to reduce the rate of infection to levels that do not overwhelm the healthcare system. And all those areas that have "returned to normal" are sending their COVID patients to regions that are still masking beca…

Can you point me to a mandate anywhere with some kind of hospitalization rate cutoff? Because everywhere where there are still mask mandates, they seem to be nebulous things that will just last until it’s no longer politically popular. Oregon for example set an arbitrary date, which of course makes no sense.

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

#336
post #169

Does 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…

Odd that you have forgotten it since Kansas, if it were it's own country, would have been a top-5 world hotspot for COVID deaths only 6 weeks ago. Is your memory really that short?

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

#337
Before everyone becomes super excited, I want you all to read this article from Nov 2: https://www.bmj.com/content/375/bmj.n2635

Read it carefully. Pfizer falsifies clinical data and covers up significant adverse effects. FDA knows about all of that and covers their asses. Whatever comes from Pfizer will be authorized without any questions being asked. It's not even a legislation, but a straight up internal arrangements between FDA and Pfizer executives.

Whatever you see in media about Pfizer is a complete crap.

I also want to remind you that Pfizer is responsible for the largest health care fraud in history. They had to pay $2.3B fine in 2009.

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

#338
post #188

We had reports of people who wanted to take weird-ass drugs-of-the-day just to refuse getting vaccinated. And screaming "conspiracy" when their efficacy was not confirmed to be as high as they expected. Good that we have something that actually works, bad that some assholes will use it as an excuse not to get vaxxed, completely missing the point (among others, trying to prevent something worse than Delta).

> some assholes will use it as an excuse not to get vaxxed, completely missing the point (among others, trying to prevent something worse than Delta). It's still quite unclear whether vaccinated or unvaccinated people pose a greater risk via viral evolution (especially w/r/t risk to people that are already vaccinated). Basically comes down to a comparison of a higher level of spread with "normal" genetic drift vs. a…

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 less than HIV:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7539923/

i.e. based on the PLOS study and the one above:

    1. PLOS study constantly uses the word "risk" and "may", i.e. the authors don't know the actual probabilities of escape and use a mathematical model based on a far more mutagenic virus, HIV.
    2. even if there's a low threshold for the virus to mutate, most of the mutations are not viable
    3. so far we've seen only 4 dominant strains, the rest are being outcompeted : https://www.google.com/search?q=how+many+dominant+mutations+of+covid+are+there
    4. It makes more logical sense to me that if your unvaccinated body takes 10 days to mount a peak immune response (as mentioned in the PLOS study), that still gives the virus more time to mutate even if there are no pressures to mutate. There's lots of missing data in your study, particularly what exactly is the mutation rate for sars-cov-2 in vaccinated vs unvaccinated populations? But if we simply look at where the dominant mutations have come from so far, it's not from countries with high vaccination rates like Israel, New Zealand, or from asian countries that take serious measures at curbing the spread of the virus, singapore, japan, korea, china.

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

#339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is true, but moot in my area. The local pharmacies that administer the vaccines are not validating your eligibility. Those I know who are interested in the 3rd round, and beyond 6 months from their 2nd, have received it.

People making up their own rules is the defining problem of the pandemic.

Sure, but I don't think people getting a booster that may not be qualified are going to prolong the pandemic, quite the opposite. There is more than enough supply.

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

#340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the consequence of not taking it is death, I think people would run to the front of the queue, though.

But that's just it, there's less than a 2% chance of dying even if you get COVID.

According to the CDC, the actual infection fatality ratio is 0.6%. Fortunately vaccination cuts that pretty close to zero.

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...

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