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President Joe Biden announced he has COVID on Wednesday.
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The White House says his symptoms are mild, including a runny nose, cough and malaise.
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He is taking the antiviral Paxlovid, but recent studies suggest it is not a good medicine.
Another summer COVID-19 outbreak is here. President Biden announced that he is infected with the virus on Wednesday and is in good company.
Test positivity rates have increased across the country, according to the latest Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Preventionwith especially high rates in California, New Mexico and Nevada, where President Biden traveled on Wednesday.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said in a statement Wednesday that the president “has received his first dose” of Paxlovid, Pfizer’s antiviral treatment that aims to alleviate COVID-19 symptoms and make the virus less dangerous for high-risk people. patients.
But some experts wonder why you would prescribe this medication, which has been shown in study after study to be lackluster at best.
Evidence Suggests Paxlovid Doesn’t Do Much
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There is no evidence of this avoids long COVID
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This does not appear to lessen the chances of a recovery when the virus comes back into play just as the patient is recovering – in fact, it may even be a little more common for patients taking Paxlovid to recover than others.
Maybe there’s something Paxlovid can do
The only thing Paxlovid seems to do is prevent some hospitalizations in very high risk patients. But even for that, studies suggest it is not a good drug.
Pfizer’s big test of more than 1,200 patients, published in April, suggested that perhaps taking Paxlovid could prevent some hospital admissions among the most frail and vulnerable patients, but it’s hard to say. Five patients who took Paxlovid in this study were hospitalized or died. In the control group (who did not take Paxlovid) this number was 10. The difference here was not even statistically significant.
Paxlovid appeared to shorten hospital stays in the Pfizer study and decrease the likelihood of ICU visits. But another UK survey, launched in May, showed absolutely no difference in mortality when comparing hospitalized patients taking Paxlovid with those not taking the drug.
Emergency room doctor Jeremiah Faust told readers of his Inside Medicine blog in June that “we must prepare for the possibility” that future studies “will show that Paxlovid is now completely unable to decrease hospitalizations or deaths, or that, at best, it does so modestly to a restricted group of very high-risk patients.”
In the early days of the COVID-19 outbreak, Paxlovid seemed like a better drug. But it just isn’t doing much for us right now.
“It’s not that Paxlovid doesn’t work anymore,” Faust said. “Instead, in 2024, there are relatively few people who still appear to actually need it to stay alive or out of the hospital.”
There is other antiviral medicine for COVID which is now available in China, called Simnotrelvir, which appears to help improve the milder initial symptoms of this disease. But it’s unclear to what extent this would help the most vulnerable patients, and in any case it’s not available in the US.
Pfizer supports Paxlovid. In a statement, a spokesperson told BI: “We remain very confident in the clinical efficacy of PAXLOVID in preventing serious outcomes from COVID-19 in patients at increased risk.”
Read the original article at Business Insider
