Houston: The company claims that Pfizer’s Kovid pill has been confirmed to help prevent serious illness. Pfizer said its antiviral pill has worked well in laboratory studies for the growing omicron variant in South Africa and Europe and will dominate U.S. cases in the coming weeks. Pfizer last month asked the Food and Drug Administration to approve a pill called Paxlovid based on preliminary batch data. The new results will strengthen the company’s claims that this means that Americans infected with the virus will receive the pill within weeks.
In a statement on Tuesday, Pfizer claimed that giving Paxlovid within three days of the onset of symptoms reduced the risk of hospitalization and death by 89 percent. If given within five days, the risk is reduced to about 88 percent. The results, based on an analysis of 2246 non-vaccinated volunteers with serious illness, are consistent with the company’s clinical trial released last month. Pfizer claimed that 0.7 percent of the patients who received Paxlovid were admitted to the hospital within 28 days of the trial and that no one died.
In contrast, 6.5 percent of patients who received placebo were hospitalized or died. Pfizer also released preliminary data from a special trial that tests low-risk people. These volunteers include people who have been vaccinated and are at risk for serious illness, as well as patients who have not been vaccinated against the risk factors. Of this group of 662 volunteers, Paxlovid reduced the risk of hospitalization and death by 70 percent, the company said.
In both trials, most volunteers were affected by the Delta variant. However, Pfizer said on Tuesday that Paxlovid had performed well in laboratory tests against the highly modified Omicron variant. Pfizer’s good news came as he waited for the approval of his antiviral pill, Merck Molnupiravir. In October, Merck and his partner Ridgeback Biotherapy said that taking the pill within five days of the onset of symptoms reduced the risk of hospitalization and death by 50 percent. But once the companies have done the final analysis of all their data, the effectiveness drops to 30 percent. At an FDA advisory board meeting last month, a number of people objected, citing concerns about the safety of the pill. The committee voted in favor of Molnupravir, but two weeks later, the FDA did not say whether it would do so. At the same time, France rejected Merck’s request, citing his moderate effectiveness and security concerns. Molnupiravir was approved by the UK last month.
The company said that if Paxlovid is approved soon, Pfizer will produce 180,000 treatment courses and plans to roll out 80 million courses worldwide by 2022. It is clear that Pfizer can make a lot of money from drugs. Investment bank SVB Leering estimates that Paxlovid will bring in $ 24 billion in global revenue by 2022 and $ 33 billion by 2023. It’s going to be one of the highest single year sales of any medical product in history.
Anyway, exactly one year ago, on December 14, 2020, after a nurse in Queens received the vaccine, the pill that has just arrived now offers great hope. For many, that moment, less than a year after the virus was discovered, was a turning point in the epidemic. But a year later, that bright moment turned bitter. The world is still battling a deadly virus and it has become a political and social question that divides the country. More than 200 million Americans have been fully vaccinated. But that’s just over 60 percent. But the road to that milestone was neither straight nor smooth. Millions of people who could have been vaccinated now have not yet received a single dose, and many of them insist they never do.
Two groups considered the most dangerous were those who received shots last winter: senior Americans and frontline health workers like Miss Lindsay, the critical care nursing director at the Long Island Jewish Medical Center. In the early days, people ran for appointments. Despite the millions of people in those groups waiting in queues, big companies were already lobbying state officials. As virus cases rose to record levels after the 2020 holidays, officials in several states moved to expand vaccine eligibility.
By mid-March, with daily case reports before the winter surge, state officials began to loosen restrictions and resume aspects of normal life that more people had left home for months. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued new recommendations in March, saying people who have been vaccinated can safely engage in small groups without masks, and by May the country had become a turning point. But as the epidemic in the United States seemed to be declining, so did the demand for vaccines. The vaccine suspicion, often due to misinformation and political posters, has led people to withdraw from the vaccine. Despite the plentiful availability, the pace of vaccine administration dropped from an average of 3.4 million doses per day in early April to just 500,000 a day in early August, although the number increased after the emergence of the alarming Delta and Omicron variants.
English Summary: Pfizer Covid Tablet Effective, Works On Omicron Variant
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