This is excellent news. Vaccines and an easy to get prescription treatment like tamiflu are how this stops being a pandemic.
Pfizer's oral Covid-19 antiviral cuts hospitalization, death by 85%
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Re: Pfizer's oral Covid-19 antiviral cuts hospitalization, death by 85%
#792Damn, 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.
Re: Pfizer's oral Covid-19 antiviral cuts hospitalization, death by 85%
#793Earlier quoted context omitted.
Being in BC, Canada sucks. I went in to an Apple store to buy the fully loaded MacBook M1 max, with 6000 dollars in my hand (literally). And was told to leave the store because my mask didn't cover my nose. I'm buying a Razer 15 now. And I'm fully vaccinated. Not because I was scared of getting sick (i already contacted COVID twice before the vaccine, including the Delta variant), but because I was shamed into gettin…
If you don't understand by now that vaccines significantly reduce transmission, you just need to google "do covid vaccines reduce transmission". The top results are links to the CDC, Nature, New Scientist, the New England Journal of Medicine, The Lancet, and more, all saying that vaccines significantly reduce transmission. Vaccines significantly reduce transmission, so if someone is telling you they don't, you need t…
> CDC, Nature, New Scientist, the New England Journal of Medicine, The Lancet
None of these sources are trusted by the people who don't want the vaccine.
Re: Pfizer's oral Covid-19 antiviral cuts hospitalization, death by 85%
#794Earlier quoted context omitted.
I haven’t read anything about this study, but this is common for highly effective treatments. Let’s say you have a randomized clinical trial with a control arm (placebo) and test arm (drug). If the vast majority of the test cases do significantly better (like 90% of the test cases), at some point it becomes unethical to continue. Why? Because you already have the evidence that the treatment works, so having the contr…
Pardon my naive question, but aren't there more objectives for the clinical trial? Particularly testing for negative side effects? How are those judged if the trial is discontinued?
This was a phase 2/3 trial. So there was some side effect data collected, but enough people went through the trial to see any large/common side effects.
I generally think of the phases like this (this is just how I think of it):
Phase 1 - is it safe? If you don’t see severe toxicity then you can go to phase 2.
Phase 2 - does it work? You look for good outcomes (cures, better survival, etc). If there is significantly better outcomes relative to placebo, then go to phase 3.
Phase 3 - does it work for a large population? What is the appropriate dose? Dialing in the numbers before public release.
Phase 4 - after you’ve made the drug public, monitor the larger population for side effects or adverse events. You can’t hope to cover all patients in a phase 2/3 trial, so you keep monitoring the first waves of patients that get the drug.
Re: Pfizer's oral Covid-19 antiviral cuts hospitalization, death by 85%
#795Damn, 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...
C-F bonds are very stable, not like O-F bonds. They're found in common drugs like Prozac, and common materials like Teflon.
Re: Pfizer's oral Covid-19 antiviral cuts hospitalization, death by 85%
#796Man, rebranded Ivermectin is pretty great, isn't it? Go figure.
Ya, too bad there wasn't any reliable, cheap, readily available potent protease inhibitor available before this.
Oh wait...
Re: Pfizer's oral Covid-19 antiviral cuts hospitalization, death by 85%
#797Earlier quoted context omitted.
That’s a straw man argument, when you take this drug you already have 100% covid19. Presumably that means you’ll have that risk, plus additional unknown risk. Perhaps the drug works like advertised, but we’ve seen better and more successful studies for things like ivermectin and anti-body treatments. Which have a known risk profile. It’s the same for the vaccine. You still have the risk of what ever the vaccine risk…
We have not seen better and more successful studies for ivermectin, we have seen a lot of studies that find it does next to nothing, and a few deeply fraudulent studies that finds that it solves world hunger. It's a strange day when people argue against evaluating a new medicine, in favour of snake oil that doesn't work. Given that you think that it's unclear that vaccines reduce the rate and seriousness of COVID, I…
Wow. I always wonder when I hear comments this.
Check out https://c19early.com (specifically, https://c19ivermectin.com/).
Re: Pfizer's oral Covid-19 antiviral cuts hospitalization, death by 85%
#798Earlier quoted context omitted.
Except now we have a federal government which thinks it knows best and will force medical decisions on you.
We've done that for decades in this country. > All 50 states (plus the District of Columbia) mandate diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis (whooping cough), polio, measles, rubella and chickenpox. In addition, every state except Iowa mandates immunization against mumps. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/10/08/states-have...
The difference is that kids still get to go to school if the parents refuse these vaccines. It has never been publicized, but it's always ultimately been up to the parents.
Re: Pfizer's oral Covid-19 antiviral cuts hospitalization, death by 85%
#799Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think that crowd will hate on this new drug. It's from Big Pharma, very expensive, it's probably full of GMOs and brain-controlling chips from Bill Gates. They'll stick with their cheap, generic ivermectin.
And to be clear, this drug is not related to ivermectin: https://apnews.com/article/fact-checking-067310377629
Except that they are both potent protease inhibitors.
Other than that, you mean?
Re: Pfizer's oral Covid-19 antiviral cuts hospitalization, death by 85%
#800Damn, 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...
C-F bonds are very stable, not like O-F bonds. They're found in common drugs like Prozac, and common materials like Teflon.
It's stable, but the chemistry to get there isn't trivial. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organofluorine_chemistry
(my Organic Chemistry class was more than 25 years ago, but I did research on drugs containing fluorine in grad school; we had to parameterize the force field specially, the bond has a ton of energy in it,
When I wrote my comment I knew somebody was going to come along and think I was implying CF3 was explosive.