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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%

#981

Post by dbsmith83 »

nradov wrote: post #511
dbsmith83 wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ...but it does little to prevent spread. Actually it does reduce transmission https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/vaccinated-people...

Vaccination slightly reduces the risk of transmission for individual interactions (at least for a while) but that just stretches the curve out a little. Since SARS-CoV-2 is now endemic throughout the worldwide human population (plus several other mammal species) we can all expect to be exposed multiple times throughout our lives no matter what we do. Fortunately the vaccines are very effective at preventing deaths. h…

> Vaccination slightly reduces the risk of transmission for individual interactions (at least for a while) but that just stretches the curve out a little...

That's a disingenuous statement though because vaccines also help prevent getting infected in the first place, which reduces transmission. This study seems to focus on vaccinated people who had a breakthrough infection. If you read the 'Interpretation' section:

> Vaccination reduces the risk of delta variant infection and accelerates viral clearance. Nonetheless, fully vaccinated individuals with breakthrough infections have peak viral load similar to unvaccinated cases and can efficiently transmit infection in household settings, including to fully vaccinated contacts.

The first sentence implies vaccination reduces the risk of getting infection. The second sentence is talking about vaccinated people with a breakthrough infection having similar viral load. Therefore saying "Vaccination slightly reduces the risk of transmission for individual interactions" is untrue because it ignores the infection prevention mechanism of the vaccine. It's a lot better than 'slightly'

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

#982

Post by rsynnott »

cblconfederate wrote: post #757
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.

Are all the other names taken ? "Viagra" was a nice choice tho

That was approved in 1998; the Drug Name Maker Upper from that era has presumably retired.

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

#983

Post by odyssey7 »

curryst wrote: post #942
odyssey7 wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A useful comparison. I have never taken Tamiflu because I know I’d need to haul my weak, shivering, flu-infected self through public to see a doctor to get the Rx, go to the pharmacy… all for the personally-uncertain benefit of Tamiflu. Nowadays, this should be easier with so many virtual appointment options and delivery services. It should be, but is it? There should be an app that does all of it for you. 1. Scan yo…

There are a couple issues off the bat. 1. You're minimizing the 2 hardest parts of doing anything medical, which is the insurance billing and state licensing requirements. The state may consider you a medical services provider even if all you do is pair people with already-certified medical professionals. 2. "That day, some delivery service will bring you the Rx." This sounds illegal or heavily licensed/regulated. It…

All important questions to figure out. Definitely not minimizing either of these two points.

I have a lot more thoughts about this and everything you wrote that comes together compellingly as a nascent business strategy, and I’m not exactly naive in this domain. My first real software job focused on medical billing and insurance complexities in one of Epic’s two accounts receivables applications, but that’s really only the beginning of it. Happy to chat and discuss further. You can find my contact info in my profile.

:-)

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

#984

Post by zamfi »

sgtnoodle wrote: post #493
rndgermandude wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you die of Covid, your loved ones will not care if the chance of that happening was low. You won't care either, you'll be dead. All it really takes is that one previously-undiagnosed comorbidity to put you in the front of a the line for a casket-fitting even if you're young(-ish). If you survive but get permanent damage e.g. due to the blood clots that a lot of COVID patients develop, or due to the side effects of…

My teenage athlete nephew mysteriously developed heart problems right around after he got vaccinated, and now he can barely walk up a flight of stairs. No one is going to say the vaccine caused it, but the timing seems pretty damning. Meanwhile, if you look at the CDC stats, the risk of injury from covid for his demographic is at least an order of magnitude lower than his risk from riding in a car. Personally I don't…

> Meanwhile, if you look at the CDC stats, the risk of injury from covid for his demographic is at least an order of magnitude lower than his risk from riding in a car

You have to look at the CDC stats and the vehicle fatalities to make this claim. "Risk from riding in a car" is extremely low. 0.008% of teens die annually (2400 out of 30 million, age 13-19) in car accidents.

Case fatality rates from COVID are an order of magnitude higher for that age group -- 0.04-0.06%, depending on your source -- so you'd have to believe case underreporting by 100x (impossible, since cases are > 1% of population everywhere) in order for risk from "riding in a car" to be "at least an order of magnitude" higher.

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

#986

Post by skosuri »

semi-extrinsic wrote: post #977
refurb wrote: post #886

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Grena…

> Promotional spend has a positive ROI (or you wouldn’t do it). That's incorrect; promotional spend on prescription drugs is the globally suboptimal result of a prisoner's dilemma where the prosecutors are going around saying "hey, that guy over there snitched, so should you". There is absolutely no guarantee that ROI is positive. > Who do you think provides capital for drug development? The Grenadier Guards? Most of…

Very little drug development happens in academia. You are missing all the time, money spent in public and private markets in the biotech ecosystem that Pharma largely is the back end buyer for through off-balance sheet acquisitions/deals. VCs collectively spend tens a billions a year on biotech (~40B this year), and much more in public markets (IPOs and secondary public finances).

In the example you bring up. Moderna raised and spent billions over a decade since it was founded on the 'academic invention', and didn't have a product until their vaccine. The same is true for BioNTech. There was a large chance these companies could have folded, and before the pandemic, most were deeply skeptical.

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

#987

Post by dang »

penultimatebro wrote: post #676
SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #549

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The mRNA vaccines do not, and never have, reduce the spread of the virus from one infected person to someone else That's simply not correct.

Well I’m convinced. Case closed, you win.

We've banned this account because it has been using HN primarily for ideological battle. That's not allowed here, regardless of what you're battling for or against.

Please don't create accounts to break HN's guidelines with.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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

#988

Post by thehappypm »

pjkundert wrote: post #836
thehappypm wrote: post #817

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you find a neutral source? I’m really interested in ivermectin but nobody posts anything from neutral web sites.

So, you don't want to review the 128 independent studies, 89 peer-reviewed -- you want me to find you more neutral sources? You're on your own, buddy! :)

I don’t like to click links to random web sites I haven’t heard of.

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

#989

Post by whymauri »

dekhn wrote: post #967
whymauri wrote: post #921

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

what does 'featurize' mean here? do you mean fingerprint feature vectors? IIRC, the computation time to get a fingerprint vector vs. extracting a murcko scaffold are pretty similar, although it depends on the fingerprint.

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

#990

Post by [deleted] »

politician wrote: post #261
tsywke44 wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I don’t. But just like I can trust the things I buy from the grocery stone to not poison me or to have stones embedded inside, I trust medical products taken by millions or even billions of people

People in urban areas like yourself only get food from the grocery store, so they naturally treat everything behind that as a black box. You have a learned belief in the “API of the City”, and that’s OK. The API tells you to inject yourself with random concoction that you can’t independently verify and so you do it. People in rural areas see how food grows directly— from the ground or from livestock. They can get foo…

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