White House TO EXPAND use of Pfizer antiviral drug Paxlovid

The White House plans to expand the use of Pfizer’s Covid antiviral pill Paxlovid, which was one day touted by President Joe Biden as the “gold standard” treatment for the virus, but some patients using the drug have reportedly returned symptoms after completing the standard course.

The first of many promising test-treatment centers Biden’s opens Thursday in Rhode Island, the state with the highest vaccination rate in America, and more are expected in the highly vaccinated states of Massachusetts and New York in the near future.

These openings come from Paxlovid, which was targeted after dozens of buyers of the acclaimed drugs reported only temporary relief of Covid symptoms. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) issued a warning earlier this week, the first to acknowledge the possible return of symptoms.

The increase in Covid cases across the country and the BA 2.12.1 strain are overtaking the “hidden” variant as the dominant version of the virus in the country. The country has an average of 107,920 cases per day, but the death toll has not increased with the cases and has so far remained at one of the lowest points of the pandemic.

On average, 356 people die from the virus every day, up 5% from last week.

Dr. Ashish Jha, who recently assumed the role of White House Covid-19 response coordinator, told the AP that between 25,000 and 30,000 drug prescriptions are dispensed each day.

The drug should be taken after a person first experiences virus symptoms and has a full five-day cycle twice daily.

Paxlovid was found to be highly effective in clinical trials, preventing 90% of hospitalizations and deaths caused by the virus, and also treating many people who took it to fight the virus.

But for many, these symptoms later returned in a bizarre phenomenon that neither Pfizer nor US officials have yet been able to fully explain.

“Paxlovid continues to be recommended for the early-stage treatment of mild to moderate COVID-19 in individuals at high risk of progressing to severe disease,” the CDC said in a statement this week.

“… Brief return of symptoms may be part of the natural history of SARS-CoV-2 infection (the virus that causes COVID-19) in some individuals, regardless of treatment and vaccination status with Paxlovid.”

“We had three cases at home with the same pattern,” 71-year-old John Donoghue told the Boston Globe about the mysterious phenomenon last month.

“Symptoms were milder for the second time… in a way we feel like Paxlovid has done its job. “It eliminated the extreme symptoms of the first round and reduced it very quickly in all three cases,” he said.

He reported that his wife and 95-year-old mother started taking the drug after contracting Covid.

Everyone started to feel better after taking Paxlovid, but started testing negative even before symptoms and positive test status returned.

Despite this increase, Jha still relies on Paxlovid to help keep deaths from the virus low. While the daily number of cases once again eclipsed 100,000 this month – the number of unfollowed cases likely dwarfs official figures – deaths remained around 300.

“What’s extraordinary about the recent increase in infections that we’ve seen is how stable the severe disease, and especially deaths, has been at eight weeks,” Jha told the AP.

“The killer of a year ago is not Covid”.

Between treatments, widely available COVID-19 vaccines and booster injections, and the milder nature of the Omicron variant, virus deaths are now preventable, Jha says.

“We are now at a point where I believe that most deaths from COVID are preventable, that the deaths that occur there are often unnecessary, and that we have many tools at our disposal to ensure that people do not suffer from it.” to die of this disease,’ he said.

Eligibility for vaccines could also be extended. Pfizer announced this week that trials of the three-dose vaccine in children aged six months to five years have shown 80 percent effectiveness in preventing infection from the Omicron variant.

An FDA consultation meeting was planned to follow up on the new report of Pfizer, which developed the project as a joint project with the German company BioNTech.

Unlike previous versions of the injection, the regimen for this age group is available in three doses. The injections are also only three micrograms (mg) in size, one-tenth of adult 30mg injections.

The New York City-based pharmaceutical giant had originally planned to give only two doses to the youngest of Americans, but preliminary results late last year showed that the first two doses had little effect on people’s immunity to the virus. four years.