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

fiercebiotech.com

481–490 of 1001 posts

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

#481
post #316
post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know if ivermectin is efficient, but I doubt it has substantial side-effects. Your first link states that ivermectin is "proved to be safe at the conventional dose, although severe adverse effects have occasionally been reported". Occasional is not "substantial". Your second link does not work for me.

The people pushing it as a COVID treatment are usually pushing prolonged usage at higher doses – they routinely dismiss studies showing no benefits as not using enough – and the documented side effects definitely happen at those levels. The lower doses used for parasite treatments also are balanced against high efficacy, whereas this just means you still have COVID along with new problems. Sorry about the link - it w…

Thanks for the updated link. What I read is: "Ivermectin has few unwanted effects."

I don't think (and you also seem to imply) that any of the studies conducted for Covid were using much higher doses than the standard. On the contrary, this was precisely the point of clinical studies: to determine whether a standard dose of ivermectin (with known and limited side effects) would provide benefits, even though it is lower than the dose at which ivermectin was initially shown to have antiviral properties in vitro.

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

#482

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.

> Does anyone have a sense as to when US society will completely eliminate COVID measures?

Children are now eligible for a vaccine. It'll take a few weeks for this to trickle through the population, but we're pretty close to the point where everyone who wants a vaccination will have one.

At that point, I expect restrictions to swiftly ease up. In Massachusetts, things are already mostly back to normal. With children protected, there's definitely a light at the end of the tunnel.

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

#483
post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I could see things starting to really ease up once all children have had a chance to be vaccinated and everyone else has had a chance to get their 6 month booster shot.

Children aren't at risk from Covid at all. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01897-w In the US, 340 children under 17 have died from Covid. Total. During the same period, 187 have died from the flu, and over 51,000 children have died from all causes: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm#Se... They are more likely to be injured by these vaccines and neurotic parents stuffing them into mas…

"at all"? What? Tons of children end up with post-acute sequelae. Where are people getting this notion that the only possible negative outcome of viral or bacterial infections is death and that that's the only stat we should look at? https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7927578/

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

#485
post #304
post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, that’s the joke

It's a bad one. Because it only works if the numbers are the same across both states. But Missouri is doing better than Kansas. So unless the virus is somehow less contagious in Missouri, it seems like Kansas is just being an idiot in this case.

Looks like anxiety is better in Kansas, though…

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

#486

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.

Second that, they sound like these made-up AliExpress/Amazon brands.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/11/style/amazon-trademark-co...

Bonus: search for OOTDTY and you'll find all sorts of unrelated items.

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

#487
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…

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.

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

#488
post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I live in South Carolina as well, and I can confirm (I think you meant 2021 not 2020?). Most people in my city have been going about life as usual since ~ May if this year. Almost nobody wears masks. Everything is open. And guess what? We’re all good! The sky isn’t falling. Hospitals aren’t being overrun. Life is good, and I can remember the last time I worried or had anxiety about Covid. There seems to be a group of…

South Carolina has had a pretty high number of cases since mid year [1]. Higher than the late 2020/early 2021 surge which was before vaccination.

It hasn't been doing all that great on death rates, either [2]. A bit worse than the Southern average, and quite a bit worse than the other regions of the US.

South Carolina has now reached the same death total per capita as the Northeast [3], which is quite astounding.

The Northeast got there by having a large number of people die early in the first couple of months of the pandemic as it tore through high density communities of especially vulnerable people while we were still trying to figure out basic things like how to treat it and what measures were practical and effective for limiting spread.

That should have cemented the Northeast as the US COVID death leader for the rest of the pandemic. But South Carolina in the last couple of months, despite over half the people being vaccinated, as managed to get a death rate that looks almost like an early pandemic Northeast death rate, eliminated the death gap.

[1] http://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/?chart=states-...

[2] http://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/?chart=states-...

[3] http://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/?chart=states-...

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

#489
post #419

Earlier 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.

The vaccines are 92–95% effective at preventing hospitalisation and death. (They also reduce spread significantly.) That's great. However, that means something like this is still very useful because of that 5–8%, especially for the elderly and the immunosuppressed, etc. (I share your skepticism anti vaxxers would be interested in an effective treatment.)

The mRNA vaccines do not, and never have, reduce the spread of the virus from one infected person to someone else.

The only thing they do is reduce symptoms. That has been known from clinical trials.

Everything else is a talking point not based on a peer reviewed scientific study. Or if you think you have a study that refutes this, please post.

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

#490

> 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…

Some patient next to them are not even offered to be part of this draw, and winning this draw (i.e. getting the real medicine) may lead to severe adverse effects. It would be unethical if this placebo was given in place of a known working alternative treatment.

> It would be unethical if this placebo was given in place of a known working alternative treatment.

From what little I know of cancer treatment, that isn't how studies are generally run. When you're part of a trial, you're either given the experimental treatment, or the "standard of care", not a placebo.

So for cancer at least, you're either getting a novel treatment, or standard chemo.

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