129 ms·

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

• stevev 5y ago
  I do think early treatments are important and that we have strong case studies to support the effectiveness of Ivermectin and high dosage of Vitamin D intake. https://c19early.com/ https://c19early.com/
  • rpmisms 5y ago
    This is good information to spread. The more we can treat moderate-to-severe COVID at home, the less burden on the hospital system.
    • docmars 5y ago
      It's unbelievable to me that people can't find the positivity in studies and results like these as long as they pose a threat to their beloved "miracle" vaccines that are objectively wrecking too many people's lives with severe adverse reactions and even death, over, and over, and over again. At some point, the horse blinders will need to be forcibly ripped off in order to help people see and understand the people right in front of them who are suffering unnecessarily as they, and their families now fight life-long conditions and grieve their losses. It feels impossible while people clutch their pearls at the mere mention of the possibility that something _else_ exists that's sufficiently and observably effective.
  • LMYahooTFY 5y ago
    And there are a frightening number of people who will say there's not enough data while Pfizer launches R&D for an entirely new drug to get it to market. Does no one else pay mind to the fact that pharmaceutical companies have zero interest in potential treatment options if they're not under patent anymore? Why do we trust them implicitly but suspect Apple does shady things like employ slave labor and suicide nets, or that Facebook downplays psychological side effects of their products?
    • twofornone 5y ago
      The real scandal would be that ivermectin worked and therefore invalidated the emergency vaccine authorization, but I doubt that will ever see the light of day given the coordinated media blitz against "horse paste".
      • swader999 5y ago
        All these quoted studies were under-powered or administered far too late and low dose and many only gave 3 does of ivermectin. It does work if you have a higher dose at .6 mg/kg, take it fairly early and as recommended by the NIH.
  • oezi 5y ago
    Why are you linking to such a page? This isn't a trustworthy source.
    • docmars 5y ago
      Oh? It only links to dozens of peer-reviewed journals and studies. Totally suspect. Can't win all the jab religion followers, it seems ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
      • oezi 5y ago
        Well the authors could start by giving their names instead of running an anonymous page online. Then they could actually use a methodology that makes sense.
        • docmars 5y ago
          And what of the methodologies presented in the individual studies? Are they not sufficient? Who are you, or anyone, to assume the curator / scientist / reporter who put this together is acting with negative intent when it presents a positive outlook for the use of other treatments that have manifested in good outcomes and healing? Don't get me wrong, it's good to be skeptical, just not selectively.
          • oezi 5y ago
            Don't get me wrong Doc. Neither you nor I nor a random dude with a web-site has the capacity to make statements that might lead people to make medical decisions. Leave that to doctors and governments please. It is good to be skeptical, but also important to trust the right people.
            • pjkundert 5y ago
              You mean, the doctors who are making such decisions, getting good results, and getting their medical licenses revoked?
  • ufo 5y ago
    There's enormous amounts of evidence that ivermectin doesn't work. If did work, we wouldn't have over 600,000 dead here in Brazil. A sizeable portion of the population, encouraged by our goverment, made use of ivermectin as a so-called preventive treatment. It didn't work, and hundreds of thousands died despite it. The only thing that is actually working is the advance of the vaccination campaign. While it started late, we thankfully are have a very large support for vaccination, and very few antivaxxers.
    • ArclightMat 5y ago
      Indeed, as a Brazilian, it gets to my nerves reading those conspiracy theories about "how the media hid ${TREATMENT}'s effectiveness" or "there is no interest on using ${TREATMENT} because no money to be made! :c". I seriously think those people are heartless. So many died because of those ineffective treatments and they keep advocating for them, with higher (and more dangerous) dosages while linking to random papers as if all of them are trustworthy (like a certain senator here). Worse, they consider those who use the right tool for the job (vaccines) the equivalent of religious nutjobs. Most of their theories don't even make sense when you consider the wide picture: For example, even if the "evil big pharma" wasn't interested on cheap treatments, governments would have done anything to avoid lockdowns that heavily damaged their economies. It is a sick joke all the way down and a disgrace to all who died before a proper treatment was available. I'm deadly sure that if they had lived through a collapse of public and private healthcare systems and/or had lost someone over it, they wouldn't be talking BS all the time.
  • tsol 5y ago
    I posted this higher up but.. Teres no reason to believe ivermectin does help. Firstly the study that Ivermectin-for-covid is based on in vitro(cell-in-petri-dish) studies of rhesus monkey liver cells[1]. Additionally. Rhesus monkeys have differing bodies sizes and in order to get an equivalent dose in humans would require overdosing on ivermectin, which can and has lead to death. Ivermectin targets the host nuclear transport importin α/β1 heterodimer in host tissue, exerting effects directly on cells of the human body.[2] 1- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/pmc/articles/PMC7129059/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/pmc/articles/PMC7129059/ 2- http://dicyt.uto.edu.bo/observatorio/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/importin-alfa.pdf http://dicyt.uto.edu.bo/observatorio/wp-content/uploads/2020... As for vitamin D. That's an interesting one. Vitamin D isn't only correlated with better covid-19 outcomes, it's associated with better cancer outcomes, as well as flu outcomes. It's also associated with better outcomes in HIV, malaria, and car crashes. It's associated with a lower ALL cause mortality[A]. Impressive stuff. Now either it's the fountain of youth, or as they like to say in the sciences this is a case of "correlation does not equal causation". Now it probably won't hurt to take, but there's more to it than that. Considering about 42% of Americans are deficient in vitamin D[B] it's not a bad idea to supplement, but that also points to another correlation-- the portion on the population that has sufficient vitamin d levels either goes out often enough to synthesize it naturally, or simply is the type to go out of their way and supplement it. So two groups that will have greater physical health than the average person. This could explain why people with sufficient vitamin D do better than with covid than the average person [A] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/pmc/articles/PMC4103214/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/pmc/articles/PMC4103214/ [B] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21310306/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21310306/
• cblconfederate 5y ago
  I hope this proves to be real going forward. The vaccination route seems to be hitting a deadend as a way to end the pandemic. The pill will have to be cheap and available over the counter, it makes no sense not to subsidize this.
  • GhettoComputers 5y ago
    They didn’t mention side effects at all.
    • JanSt 5y ago
      I think less than in the placebo group, so none really
    • cblconfederate 5y ago
      True, OTOH unless the side effects are worse than covid, this is absolutely game changing
  • Ginden 5y ago
    There is catch for antiviral drugs - like antibacterial drugs, they can lead to selection of resistant strains. Therefore, we can't just give it away to everyone without any control.
    • cblconfederate 5y ago
      we re already doing that with vaccines which are given to more people. Besides this does not stop the virus from transmitting, but it mitigates its harmful effect
• orestarod 5y ago
  What is a bit saddening is that there was a placebo percentage that died... which could have been saved if given the actual drug.
• rafale 5y ago
  So as good as a vaccine basically?
  • jensensbutton 5y ago
    Minus the preventative part.
    • rbut 5y ago
      Preventative of what? Serious disease? - The same/similar (though studies have shown this declines within 6 months). Op is correct. Catching/Transmission? - The current vaccines are systemic and not mucosal, so they don't stop it infecting the upper respiratory tract. - A recent study shows fully-vaccinated households can spread at similar rates to unvaccinated households [1] [1] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3099(21)00648-4/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3...
      • spankalee 5y ago
        From your own link: "Vaccination reduces the risk of delta variant infection and accelerates viral clearance."
  • G79 5y ago
    as "good" as...as in...its effectiveness % reduces in line with the increase in profits?
  • spazrunaway 5y ago
    I'm excited to hear the results of the pill among the vaccinated. Cutting the risk of severe symptoms among high-risk vaccinated people, and the risk of long covid for everyone is very important. The vaccines are great, but not silver bullets themselves.
    • otabdeveloper4 5y ago
      "Long covid" is an urban legend.
• brink 5y ago
  > There were six hospitalizations and no deaths among the 607 patients who received Paxlovid within five days of symptom onset, compared to 41 hospitalizations and 10 deaths in the placebo cohort. How does this work? You sign up for the program when you're sick and you might get meds that help you? That would really suck if a loved one was in the program and died because they happened to get the placebo.
  • imeron 5y ago
    Standard double blind trial protocol: you sign up for the trial. You might get the actual drug or you might get placebo. It's double blind because not even the doctor knows who gets what.
  • jeffbee 5y ago
    They randomly assign people to the control or treatment cohort. Don’t forget there’s also the chance that the treatment gives patients liver cancer or some other yet-unknown adverse outcomes.
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  • kenjackson 5y ago
    It’s a trial. That’s not how they distribute it outside of a trial.
  • kibwen 5y ago
    > That would really suck if a loved one was in the program and died because they happened to get the placebo. Trials like this are performed in desperate situations, and you only ever hear about the success stories. Most such trials probably result in no measurable benefit, and run the risk of an even worse outcome than the placebo.
  • tinus_hn 5y ago
    The alternative is what we have right now, ‘scientists’ blathering about their assumptions with the constant disclaimer that nobody really knows for real. Real science does have a price.
• fag_tits 5y ago
  Sooo...rebranded ivermectin basically?
• charbull 5y ago
  The data sample is a bit low? 1200 people
  • dragontamer 5y ago
    Gotta prove it with 1200 before you get the funding for 10,000.
  • tpxl 5y ago
    Depending on the effect severity you can get a representative sample from as low as 40 people (not necessarily in this case).
  • spywaregorilla 5y ago
    That's not low for the effect size they're observing. Note that this is a phase 2/3 trial. The safety trials have already occurred.
  • roywiggins 5y ago
    The effect size was very large. The calculated p-value was <0.0001. https://www.pfizer.com/news/press-release/press-release-detail/pfizers-novel-covid-19-oral-antiviral-treatment-candidate https://www.pfizer.com/news/press-release/press-release-deta...
  • nonfamous 5y ago
    This is a randomized clinical trial; participants are recruited into the study using methods that eliminate the biases associated with self-selected participation, like internet or TV polls. You can get statistically valid results from small samples, that apply to very broad populations, using this methodology.
  • DavidPeiffer 5y ago
    To mention it, not necessarily directed at you. Larger test groups are required when trying to distinguish between less effective treatments. If rabies has a 99% death rate and you try your rabies treatment on 10 people, 9 of whom live, that's much stronger evidence than a situation where 50% of people died without treatment versus 48% with treatment (sample size 100). To be confident it's not just random chance, you'll need a really large sample size for the 2nd situation.
• phh 5y ago
  > Pfizer used data on patients who were treated within three days of symptom onset as the headline finding in its press release > There were six hospitalizations and no deaths among the 607 patients who received Paxlovid within five days of symptom onset, compared to 41 hospitalizations and 10 deaths in the placebo cohort. > Like Merck, Pfizer excluded people vaccinated against COVID-19 from its late-phase study. No pricing information. I'm worried that "3 days after symptoms onset" is too short to be usable in real-life, but I could be wrong.
  • nradov 5y ago
    Monoclonal antibody treatments are also commonly administered about 3 days after symptoms onset. They have proven to be somewhat effective in real life, although they still aren't being given to some patients who could potentially benefit.
    • apendleton 5y ago
      The monoclonal therapies are also administered by IV in a clinical setting, whereas this can be taken at home and could probably even be delivered. It should be even easier to make it within the three-day window with this treatment.
  • prepend 5y ago
    If the cost is low enough and the side effects are mild enough it could work. People would take it before a test is positive so would end up taking it when they didn’t really need it. It’s similar to the antivirals for flu where you need to take it early on so it becomes habit to test early and start early. Home labs will help with this too. Where someone could take a test, get a prescription and pickup within a few hours.
    • odyssey7 5y ago
      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 your insurance card. 2. You get notified when a doctor is ready for your virtual visit. 3. If appropriate you get the Rx written. 4. That day, some delivery service will bring you the Rx. 5. Maybe a testing service stops by as well. Insurance companies should want to participate if it decreases Flu or Covid hospitalization for a reasonable cost. Anyone want to make this happen? My fall classes are nearly all finished. Edit: Pharmaceutical companies may wish to partner as well. Lots of avenues for this kind of service to find revenue.
• tasogare 5y ago
  Glad I waited instead of taking part in an experiment trial. There was an "easy" solution after all... I wonder what is the gotcha though, since it's a Pfizer study. Maybe something like selling a known molecule 10 times more expensive than before after rebranding it for the new usage?
  • ralmeida 5y ago
    Why is this drug less experimental than the vaccines?
    • tinus_hn 5y ago
      That is a valid question but another thing to note is that you wouldn’t be giving this drug to the vast majority of people who do not get any symptoms from a Covid-19 infection. Nor would you be forcing people to take this drug.
      • ralmeida 5y ago
        Which is a fair viewpoint from the societal level, but not as much for the individual level, which was implied in the parent message - i.e. how can "I'll take experimental treatment B instead of experimental treatment A" be an argument for not taking experimental treatments in general?
        • tinus_hn 5y ago
          Imagine both the vaccine and the drug offer the same protection, and both come with a risk of 0.00001 that you will die from taking it. Considering not everyone who gets infected gets symptoms, would it be illogical to not take the vaccine, just in case you get infected and get symptoms, but to take the drug once you do get infected and get symptoms?
          • ralmeida 5y ago
            It wouldn't be necessarily illogical but would still qualify as "taking part in an experiment trial", as put by the parent post. To determine if this is a rational strategy or not, we'd have to get real numbers (is it really likely that 1 in 100k people die from taking the vaccine?), and compare that against the reduction in probability of dying from COVID by even combining both treatments.
• black6 5y ago
  Three different headlines, three different efficacy percentages (89%, 90%, and now 85%), all of which originate from Pfizer's own studies. Color me dubious.
  • shusaku 5y ago
    I also found the article a little hard to parse, but after a close read it seems that the 85% is the whole trial, and 89% is for people who got the drug within three days.
  • spywaregorilla 5y ago
    The differences in these percentages are all trivially small and explained in the article. 85% is the overall view; 89% is on the sub population treated within 3 days of symptom onset; and 90% appears to be an editorialized "almost" approximation from news agencies. Fuck off with this fud.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
• shusaku 5y ago
  I think it’s hard to overstate what a big deal this is for science. This is a completely novel molecule that appears effective as an antiviral. This would a huge achievement for the field of drug design, and will hopefully lead to all kinds of great medicine.
  • savant_penguin 5y ago
    And it's here in _two_ years
    • toyg 5y ago
      One one side: great job, pharma industry! We're gonna live forever! On the other side: what are you folks not curing, with your magic powers, just because you know you won't be able to make a buck from it...?
      • adminscoffee 5y ago
        this is where my mind was going, trying to remain positive and less conspiracy theory though. but it's really not secret that some companies (presumably pharmaceutical companies as well) have to stay in business and sometimes in order to do so, many companies build products that wear out, see how gillette razors came about for more insight on that
      • et2o 5y ago
        Researchers in pharma are working extremely hard and almost always in good faith. I know this is probably tongue-in-cheek but it's not true.
        • toyg 5y ago
          Yeah it's not really researchers that I'm worried about, it's their bosses.
          • bun_at_work 5y ago
• tinus_hn 5y ago
  So, is this expensive and patented and does it have limited availability?
  • tamaharbor 5y ago
    Invermectin Plus
  • n8cpdx 5y ago
    Does it matter? Vaccine flows like water these days, and at least in the rich world, nearly everyone who needs this chose to be in that position. Making that choice should be incredibly costly.
    • scohesc 5y ago
      I think it does matter. If it's expensive - we'll have government printing more money to afford the pill, like they've been doing for the vaccine, and the general populace for the past 2 years. But the vaccine is free! Yep... sure.
      • brokensegue 5y ago
        Do you think there's a significant increase in government spending for paying for these pills? It's trivial compared to things like enhanced welfare benefits or military spending
        • GhettoComputers 5y ago
          Yes, by sheer volume. It’s not trivial. Monoclonal antibodies are thousands of dollars per treatment for instance and the idea of business loans or small business aid is that it’s going to investment. Of course none of this matters in 2019 a repo crisis was triggered: https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/September_2019_events_in_the_U.S._repo_market https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/September_2019_events_in_the_... They needed to inject liquidity into the economy and justified it with COVID.
• ed25519FUUU 5y ago
  > Pfizer’s phase 2/3 trial randomized non-hospitalized adult COVID-19 patients who were at high risk of progressing to severe illness to receive placebo or Paxlovid, a combination of the protease inhibitors Oh, a protease inhibitor you say? I was told those were horse dewormers by the media. This whole thing is bullshit. With this much money at stake we were never going to learn the truth.
  • sharklazer 5y ago
    You forgot the best part. They get to patent it and charge 10000 times more.
  • roywiggins 5y ago
    The difference is that this one has a double-blind study showing high effectiveness. There's no reason to think every protease inhibitor is as good as the next, drugs are weird and unpredictable, and you can only know if they work with a good study.
  • HelloMcFly 5y ago
    Except this is studied and dosed appropriately vs. tacking a bunch of Ivermectin and shitting your intestines out based on a half-truth you read about from Facebook.
    • dontcare007 5y ago
      Like what happened with Joe Rogan, oh wait, he recovered.
      • ceejayoz 5y ago
        As have people who didn't get ivermectin. As have people who didn't get any treatment. That's why we rely on data from more than one case, to figure out relative effectiveness of different treatment methods.
      • HelloMcFly 5y ago
        Do you believe that to be some sort of counter-argument or opposing view for anything I said? Regardless of the answer, I'm not interested in debating the wisdom of taking dog medicine in unstudied doses for an unstudied treatment with unstudied effectiveness that has a clearly documented ability to strip the lining of your intestines. You want be a trailblazer with every Facebook remedy? Be my guest.
• fullstackchris 5y ago
  Did anyone hear NPR's reporting on this? They said the early study was originally halted BECAUSE of it's positive effects at preventing hospitalization and death... very weird, I hope it is a typo or I'm understanding it wrong...
  • pkulak 5y ago
    If something proves to be too effective, too early in a trail, it's no longer ethical to give placebos to the control group.
  • guerrilla 5y ago
    Maybe they meant that further study at that level was not necessary and they were moving on to later stage trials? In order to speed up the release I mean.
  • peapod91 5y ago
    That’s correct. If a positive effect in the treatment arm of the study is found to be strong enough, it is deemed unethical to continue giving patients the placebo as control. Hence, they terminate the study and proceed to the next phase of approval
    • orra 5y ago
      That it's unethical to continue giving half the participants a placebo makes sense. I am curious though: do they ever continue with the trial, with the patients on the actual drug? Might that be useful for monitoring rare-ish side effects, even if the drug is highly effective?
      • zerkten 5y ago
        They almost always do this as an approval requirement.
        • orra 5y ago
          Gotcha, thanks.
• vibrato2 5y ago
  Kinda like ivermectin with the same mechanism
  • kibwen 5y ago
    'There is no relationship at all between the two drugs, said Dr. William A Petri, professor of infectious diseases at the University of Virginia. “The only way they are alike is that they are both pills,” Petri said. Dr. Kevin J. Downes, assistant professor of pediatrics at the Perelman School of Medicine of the University of Pennsylvania, agreed, “They are dramatically different molecules. The drugs are different in their structure and their molecular size.” [...] Ivermectin binds to glutamate-gated chloride channels and is used to treat parasite infections, said Joseph Glajch, a consultant in pharmaceutical and analytical chemistry. “These two are so far apart,” he said. “If you look at how they interact with the body..., they don’t even go to the same pathways or receptors.”' https://apnews.com/article/fact-checking-067310377629 https://apnews.com/article/fact-checking-067310377629
    • colordrops 5y ago
      Dr. Kevin J. Downes receives money from Pfizer: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/art.41772 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/art.41772
    • thedorkknight 5y ago
      To the user who keeps getting comments deleted for bringing up this guy's funding: please look up "ad hominem fallacy". Attacking someone making a statement says nothing about the truth of their statement
      • vibrato2 5y ago
        What attack? He stated a fact about this mans funding relationship to Pfizer. He didn’t say anything about his trustworthiness, you assumed such. It’s not an ad hominem if it’s something the reader assumes. It is a relevant detail to consider whether to trust the person’s statement. He didn’t say the guy was a shill or to never trust a funded scientist.
• rob_c 5y ago
  why does this site make it so difficult to escape back in history again? someone please shoot that designer.
• RicoElectrico 5y ago
  We had reports of people who wanted to take weird-ass drugs-of-the-day just to refuse getting vaccinated. And screaming "conspiracy" when their efficacy was not confirmed to be as high as they expected. Good that we have something that actually works, bad that some assholes will use it as an excuse not to get vaxxed, completely missing the point (among others, trying to prevent something worse than Delta).
  • civilized 5y ago
    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.
    • RicoElectrico 5y ago
      In Poland the "wonder drug" was amantadine and the "martyr" was dr Bodnar.
    • tclancy 5y ago
      And LUCIFERASE!
      • adrianN 5y ago
        That's the enzyme you take when you have trouble digesting Satan?
    • tsywke44 5y ago
      No they won’t. conspiracy theories are based on instincts and emotions not any science or rationality. pills are basically just food(=good) to the subconscious lizard brain, zero negative connotations from evolution, zero conspiracy theories
      • civilized 5y ago
        But if that were an iron truth, wouldn't people be comfortable with GMOs?
• loceng 5y ago
  Sounds like same/similar rate as Ivermectin - if proper protocol followed.
  • distantsounds 5y ago
    No, that has nowhere near the same efficacy.
    • loceng 5y ago
      C19ivermectin.com - which includes well done and poorly done studies - lists 86% reduction with prophylaxis treatment. You'll believe and weight a single study done by the company looking to make billions via a new patented drug over many third-party studies of a cheap off-patent drug though, won't you?
      • acdha 5y ago
        No, that site is anonymous for a reason: the information presented hasn’t passed scientific review and relies on various methodological and analytic errors to show positive effects. https://ebm.bmj.com/content/early/2021/05/26/bmjebm-2021-111678 https://ebm.bmj.com/content/early/2021/05/26/bmjebm-2021-111...
        • loceng 5y ago
          Do you think mentioning the site being anonymous gives any strength to your argument? Have your links been peer reviewed by competent individuals who aren't toeing the line? I wonder if https://mobile.twitter.com/alexandrosM https://mobile.twitter.com/alexandrosM has analyzed your links yet, I'll ask him. He's been debunking "long form"/poorly done "deep analysis" for awhile now - including people trying to show flaws in Ivermectin studies but where their methods are selective and showing bias; and then arrogant people like you jump in claiming they 100% know the truth.
  • acdha 5y ago
    Stop spreading disinformation. This has gone through studies showing significant positive benefits. Ivermectin has small studies with dubious methodology showing possible effects and larger studies with better methodology showing no benefit, along with substantial side-effects. https://ebm.bmj.com/content/early/2021/05/26/bmjebm-2021-111678 https://ebm.bmj.com/content/early/2021/05/26/bmjebm-2021-111... https://www.cochranelibrary.com/content?templateType=full&urlTitle=/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD015017.pub2&doi=10.1002/14651858.CD015017.pub2&type=cdsr&contentLanguage= https://www.cochranelibrary.com/content?templateType=full&ur...
• roenxi 5y ago
  > This is a completely novel molecule... Then do we understand the risk profile of this thing? That sounds like the sort of innovation that people would want to be at the back of the queue for. Side effects don't have to happen in the next 6 months.
  • matsemann 5y ago
    If the consequence of not taking it is death, I think people would run to the front of the queue, though.
    • blackbear_ 5y ago
      Soo, kinda like for a vaccine? (And to clarify what I am saying, even though the vaccine does prevent death, there is still considerable push back. Not sure why it will be different for this drug)
      • pell 5y ago
        From what I understand it's taken once an infection is already established. Maybe it's easier to convince the "skeptics" under those circumstances to take potentially life-saving medicine.
        • roywiggins 5y ago
          Sure, those same skeptics, once they're sick, happily line up for an hourlong infusion of experimental monoclonal antibodies, which have similarly unknown "long-term side effects" or whatever they're worried about. It turns out that long-term side effects (which are a possibility with every livesaving medical intervention- what are the long-term side effects of CPR?) are a lot less scary compared to short-term death.
          • deleted 5y ago
            [deleted]
        • 5y ago
• colordrops 5y ago
  Does anyone have a sense as to when US society will completely eliminate COVID measures? Is it just me or is there no clear exit criteria anymore? This will go on forever without exit criteria.
  • School-Cotton 5y ago
    It seems like we are experiencing a very slow and gradual offramp from the restrictions, rather than something that will have a clearly defined endpoint. 2021 is already "mostly normal", for me. I hope sometime in 2022 we will be back to "100% normal", but I'm not confident.
    • avaika 5y ago
      It really really depends on where you are. E.g. in my country it's almost like "normal". But that's not what you think. People just don't follow restrictions, people don't wear masks, abuse vaccination (simply skip or even buy fake vaccination certificate to fulfill government / employer requirements). The only difference from "normal" is increased workload on hospitals and daily news "over thousand people died today from covid-19". When it's absolutely unbearable for healthcare system, government also introduces soft lockdown where restaurants / cafes / public places are closed. Then everything goes back to "normal". I really don't see how it can be 100% normal next year. At least in here.
    • kgin 5y ago
      Masks became a regular fixture in Asia after original SARS. Not by regulation, but they just became an ordinary item used by people to avoid getting sick or avoid getting others sick.
      • School-Cotton 5y ago
        Having been to many parts of Asia before Covid hit, masks were indeed not unusual, but were never worn by _everyone_ or even the majority of people, even in crowded places like subways.
• orra 5y ago
  I am thinking: if and when this is approved, we have to think about distribution. This drug is fantastically effective at preventing hospitalisation and death, if administered within three days of symptom onset. That gives quite a long time! But we still need to make it easy to take. Do pharmacies give it out? ER rooms? We don't want to wait until people are hospitalised; we are trying to avoid that. So when you test positive, does the government send you out a pill with the "sorry, you have to isolate" SMS?
  • GhettoComputers 5y ago
    Who is the market for this? The assumption is that you give it ASAP and people want to take it. If people aren’t interested in vaccinations they may not want it either, and the vaccines are already very effective at preventing these issues.
    • delecti 5y ago
      I think skepticism of vaccines largely doesn't transfer to the broader medical field. The ineffective fad treatments (ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine) are still medicine, but are still "popular" with vaccine skeptics. It's not rational, but I think vaccine skepticism is largely not rational to begin with.
      • mchusma 5y ago
        Anecdotally, hearing from doctors working in COVID wards, they consist almost entirely of anti-vaxxers who are now seeking (and receiving) treatments only recently approved. So while not everyone will take this, I think probably many would once they have symptoms. That said, this does work better it seems if taken early, before the anti-vax sentiment may have worn off. Hard to say. What it does signal is really the "end of the pandemic". We have both a vaccine (now approved for kids) and a cure. That sounds like it to me.
        • laurent92 5y ago
          This. Being antivax when one has 93% if not facing the virus ≠ refusing drugs when infected. At that point, it’s worth doing everything because the risk is realized.
• neltnerb 5y ago
  If you take an antiviral like this, do you still develop a good immune response to reinfection? I wonder because almost everyone who might end up needing this isn't vaccinated (based on hospitalization rates) so I hope that at the end they also end up having some immunity to catching it again at least. In the moment of course it is better to use than not.
  • lekanwang 5y ago
    You should -- protease inhibitors inhibit replication, but existing viruses should be more than enough to generate a durable response in most individuals.
    • prox 5y ago
      If I remember correctly, it’s not Covid that kills you directly , but a runaway immune response. What was the name… Cytokine storm?
      • rbut 5y ago
        Early treatment means that the virus doesn't replicate from the upper respiratory tract down to the lungs, where yes the cytokine storm can kill you.
      • neltnerb 5y ago
        Is it not always the case? Do we say that Ebola doesn't kill you directly, it's the hemorrhaging and multi-organ failure? Of course it doesn't kill you "directly" for some sufficiently narrow definition of direct.
        • daddylongstroke 5y ago
          Except for the flu apparently. The flu never kills. It's the pneumonia and heart failure.
  • pezzana 5y ago
    No. There's a big difference between drugs and vaccines. The drug doesn't generally illicit an immune response, but the vaccine is designed to do exactly that.
• Someone1234 5y ago
  I thought the Mechanism of action section for this drug on Wikipedia was quite interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molnupiravir#Mechanism_of_action https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molnupiravir#Mechanism_of_acti...
  • cblconfederate 5y ago
    This is not molnupiravir. That one is mutagenic, (which makes a lot of people skeptical about its use).
• jolts 5y ago
  Lets ignore the fact that its basically ivermectin with more side effects. Except ivermectin is 30 cent per dose and not under patent..
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • twofornone 5y ago
    Well, they are both protease inhibitors. It is quite plausible that if this drug works that ivermectin also does indeed work. But this isn't new information and every time I post it I get downvoted for spreading "misinformation". But big pharma would never skip an existing, cheap, off patent treatment in lieu of guaranteed multi-billion dollar, liability free vaccine contracts, right? We can totally trust these guys, it's a pandemic after all, how low would you need to stoop to use that as an excuse to make billions of risk free dollars? It's completely implausible that for example, the former FDA commissioner, who now sits on Pfizer's board of directors along with the CEO of Reuters, would pressure the FDA to ignore an existing, safe, cheap medication to instead pursue vaccines based on a novel, widely applicable tech ology and new, expensive, patentable medication. We're only talking tens of billions of guaranteed, risk free dollars here, contractually free of any liability. Nope, no need to worry about regulatory capture, about self serving past mistakes that harmed hundreds of thousands of people in the past on behalf of characters like Fauci (see his AIDS debacle), no, its totally impossible, this is a global pandemic after all and industrial executives are known to be shining beacons of honesty.
    • reureu 5y ago
      Ivermectin isn't a protease inhibitor though?
      • twofornone 5y ago
        https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7996102/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7996102/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7996102/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7996102/ Almost as if after clinical evidence (sure, arguably week) and a promising mechanism of action (yeah, in silico) a widespread, double blind RCT should have been conducted a year ago...
• GhettoComputers 5y ago
  The title is all marketing. What’s the control? > The rates of hospitalization or death in the Paxlovid and control arms were 1% and 6.7%, respectively, resulting in a risk reduction of 85%. Most people that get COVID don’t go to the hospital nor do they die. How much is from a null hypothesis; people who wouldn’t have complications anyway? It’s barely significant if you use 5% as the minimum, and it can still be noise. Vaccinated people are not going to have complications like this anyway. People care about not getting infected, this treatment is inferior to monoclonal antibodies and not barely significantly different from control.
  • ceejayoz 5y ago
    If you read past said title, the article literally includes details on the control group. > The rates of hospitalization or death in the Paxlovid and control arms were 1% and 6.7%, respectively, resulting in a risk reduction of 85%. > Pfizer used data on patients who were treated within three days of symptom onset as the headline finding in its press release. In that subpopulation, the rates of hospitalization or death in the Paxlovid and control groups were 0.8% and 7%, respectively, resulting in a risk reduction of 89%. Merck’s 50% reduction was seen in patients who were randomized within five days of symptom onset.
    • GhettoComputers 5y ago
      My point was that we don’t know anything about the control. Age, BMI, health, vaccination status, sex. The effectiveness is very low.
      • ceejayoz 5y ago
        > My point was that we don’t know anything about the control. Age, BMI, health, vaccination status, sex. This information will absolutely be part of the FDA's EUA process, and as such, it's a silly idea that Pfizer would've set up a study that doesn't account for these. > The effectiveness is very low. Bullshit.
        • 5y ago
• shoto_io 5y ago
  This is Pfizer’s antiviral drug. Merck’s drug might be effective as well, but if seems like to be also a drug with many side affects interfering with your genome. Getting vaccinated looks like a better option to me. Anyone know if the Pfizer one works similarly? https://www.forbes.com/sites/williamhaseltine/2021/11/02/harming-those-who-receive-it-the-dangers-of-molnupiravir-part-2/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/williamhaseltine/2021/11/02/har...
  • apendleton 5y ago
    Per the article: > As a protease inhibitor, Paxlovid is free from the theoretical DNA-alteration risk tied to the mechanism of action of Merck’s molnupiravir.
• inwardsword 5y ago
  Press X to doubt.
• tacobelllover99 5y ago
  You mean ivermectin with a new name? Got it. Sad world we are living in right now.
• rsynnott 5y ago
  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.
  • RicoElectrico 5y ago
    Second that, they sound like these made-up AliExpress/Amazon brands. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/11/style/amazon-trademark-copyright.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/11/style/amazon-trademark-co... Bonus: search for OOTDTY and you'll find all sorts of unrelated items.
  • cblconfederate 5y ago
    Are all the other names taken ? "Viagra" was a nice choice tho
    • rsynnott 5y ago
      That was approved in 1998; the Drug Name Maker Upper from that era has presumably retired.
  • dopa42365 5y ago
    Basically all pharmaceutical names are created by the same branding company. https://www.brandinstitute.com/ https://www.brandinstitute.com/ There goes the "company A has better names than company B" theory?
  • oblio 5y ago
    Comirnaty sounds like Comintern (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_International https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_International) to me :-D
    • throwaway821909 5y ago
      I always think "comorbidity"
• charles_f 5y ago
  > compared to 41 hospitalizations and 10 deaths in the placebo cohort This makes me weirdly sad. Can you imagine entering the trial for a long sought drug against a deadly disease that turn out to be working, and end up in the control group? I know that there's more to it (it's necessary, they knew, it could have not worked, plainly be nocive, etc.) but it's like being unlucky twice in a row and die out of that while having received the real thing would have saved you
  • jpambrun 5y ago
    Some patient next to them are not even offered to be part of this draw, and winning this draw (i.e. getting the real medicine) may lead to severe adverse effects. It would be unethical if this placebo was given in place of a known working alternative treatment.
    • thomascgalvin 5y ago
      > It would be unethical if this placebo was given in place of a known working alternative treatment. From what little I know of cancer treatment, that isn't how studies are generally run. When you're part of a trial, you're either given the experimental treatment, or the "standard of care", not a placebo. So for cancer at least, you're either getting a novel treatment, or standard chemo.
      • epylar 5y ago
        in this case there was no standard of care
  • thehappypm 5y ago
    Yeah, I would consider that 10 people likely did not die because they enrolled and got lucky.
  • ImaCake 5y ago
    It is sad and unfortunately needed. You will note they stopped this study at the first “interim analysis”. One of the really important reasons such interim analyses are done is precisely to stop a trial when it so obviously works. They then switch anyone in the placebo group to the real drug. It is difficult to overstate just how much thought and argument has gone into clinical trial design in the last half century. It may seem detached and unfeeling, but basically every step is carefully considered compassion, ethics, and a desire for unambiguous causal truth of drug effectiveness.
• tzs 5y ago
  > [...] patients who received Paxlovid within five days of symptom onset [...] I wonder how well it will do on people who are farther along in their COVID infection? There are a lot of people who don't get vaccinated, don't take precautions to avoid COVID, dismiss their early symptoms either because they believe COVID isn't worse than a typical cold or flu or because they think that is probably what they have, just treat it at home with vitamins and ivermectin if they do anything at all about it, and don't end up going to a doctor or hospital until they are having so much trouble breathing they have to go to the emergency room.
  • jaywalk 5y ago
    I wonder if having an effective oral antiviral readily available will result in someone who would have acted in the manner you suggest seeking this treatment instead.
  • grey413 5y ago
    My understanding is that other antivirals are much less effective after the first week or so of infection.
  • swader999 5y ago
    Why not just treat it at home with ivermectin if it works? It did for me for long covid.
    • tsol 5y ago
      Because theres no reason to believe it does. Firstly the study that Ivermectin-for-covid is based on in vitro(cell-in-petri-dish) studies of rhesus monkey liver cells[1]. Additionally. Rhesus monkeys have differing bodies sizes and in order to get an equivalent dose in humans would require overdosing on ivermectin, which can and has lead to death. Ivermectin targets the host nuclear transport importin α/β1 heterodimer in host tissue, exerting effects directly on cells of the human body.[2] On top of this you refer to 'long covid' which has nothing to do with the covid virus itself. Long covid is the syndrome after a person gets over a covid infection. They're not entirely sure what causes it, but damage to internal organs and the venous system have been observed[3]. At this point there is no active viral infection in your system, inhibiting viral replication is basically irrelevant. There is absolutely zero reason, even according to the logic of ivermectin-for-covid, that ivermectin would treat that damage. 1- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/pmc/articles/PMC7129059/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/pmc/articles/PMC7129059/ 2- http://dicyt.uto.edu.bo/observatorio/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/importin-alfa.pdf http://dicyt.uto.edu.bo/observatorio/wp-content/uploads/2020... 3- https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/coronavirus/in-depth/coronavirus-long-term-effects/art-20490351 https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/coronavirus/i...
• throwawaymedia 5y ago
  Before everyone becomes super excited, I want you all to read this article from Nov 2: https://www.bmj.com/content/375/bmj.n2635 https://www.bmj.com/content/375/bmj.n2635 Read it carefully. Pfizer falsifies clinical data and covers up significant adverse effects. FDA knows about all of that and covers their asses. Whatever comes from Pfizer will be authorized without any questions being asked. It's not even a legislation, but a straight up internal arrangements between FDA and Pfizer executives. Whatever you see in media about Pfizer is a complete crap. I also want to remind you that Pfizer is responsible for the largest health care fraud in history. They had to pay $2.3B fine in 2009.
  • ceejayoz 5y ago
    One of Pfizer's trial vendors falsified information. https://www.cbs17.com/news/north-carolina-news/fact-check-report-questioning-pfizer-trial-shouldnt-undermine-confidence-in-vaccines/ https://www.cbs17.com/news/north-carolina-news/fact-check-re... > The Pfizer Phase III trial involved 44,000 people and 153 locations. From August 2020 through Sept. 17, 2020 — when she was fired — Jackson told CBS 17 that Ventavia accounted for at least 1,200 of those people and accounted for three sites. The author of the BMJ piece is quoted as saying “people are going to use this to push a political position because that’s what they’re interested in”, so congrats on demonstrating that.
    • throwawaymedia 5y ago
      • ceejayoz 5y ago
        If you open up the actual VAERS (https://vaers.hhs.gov/data.html https://vaers.hhs.gov/data.html), you'll see disclaimers like this: > Reports may include incomplete, inaccurate, coincidental and unverified information. > The number of reports alone cannot be interpreted or used to reach conclusions about the existence, severity, frequency, or rates of problems associated with vaccines. The numbers are suddenly high, in part, because of this: https://vaers.hhs.gov/faq.html https://vaers.hhs.gov/faq.html > Healthcare providers are required to report to VAERS the following adverse events after COVID-19 vaccination [under Emergency Use Authorization (EUA)], and other adverse events if later revised by CDC... There's a COVID-specific reporting requirement on a previously optional system.
• pezzana 5y ago
  > Pfizer’s phase 2/3 trial randomized non-hospitalized adult COVID-19 patients who were at high risk of progressing to severe illness to receive placebo or Paxlovid, a combination of the protease inhibitors PF-07321332 and ritonavir. The efficacy analysis is based on 1,219 patients. One noteworthy feature is the newness of this drug: > PF-07321332 was developed from scratch during the current pandemic. It’s a reversible covalent inhibitor that reacts with one of the main protease’s cysteine residues. Owen [director of medicinal chemistry at Pfizer] also discussed the chemistry involved in scaling up the compound. The first 7 mg of the compound were synthesized in late July 2020. Encouraged by the early biological data, the Pfizer team aimed to scale up the synthesis. By late October, they’d made 100 g of the compound. Just two weeks later, the chemists had scaled up the synthesis to more than 1 kg. Owen said 210 researchers had worked on the project. https://cen.acs.org/acs-news/acs-meeting-news/Pfizer-unveils-oral-SARS-CoV/99/i13 https://cen.acs.org/acs-news/acs-meeting-news/Pfizer-unveils... Less than two years from lab to clinic is highly unusual. If approved, I believe this would be the fastest lab-to-approval for a small molecule drug in the history of the FDA.
  • HWR_14 5y ago
    >Less than two years from lab to clinic is highly unusual. I assume like most other COVID vaccines/treatments, the timeline is shrunk by going straight to more expensive phases of the trial instead of having preliminary ones of escalating cost and confidence. Or at least prepping for them. For instance, all the vaccines started setting up commercial production around the same time they started trials, because it's not worth the months delay of setting up a production line to determine if it worked first.
    • acdha 5y ago
      Also one factor slowing some studies has been the need to wait for test cases: you can't infect people with, say, Ebola so you need to wait for enough people in your study cohort to contract it naturally to get enough data to say whether a vaccine candidate is having an impact. During a pandemic, it's sadly easy to hit a statistically-significant number of infections.
    • 5y ago
• thehappypm 5y ago
  It’s crazy that money is such a huge incentive. Knowing that a cure for Covid is a potentially $100B market means you throw the kitchen sink at it. Imagine being this lab. Do you think they ever had trouble hiring an assistant? Buying new equipment? Getting bonuses? This environment must be fantastically different from the typical meat grinder of bio R&D.
  • ryanobjc 5y ago
    Therefore how can you trust this drug? Follow the money! It’s just big science trying to propagate a pandemic to make more money! If this sounds insane, we’ll ok just reflecting the common anti vax sentiments I hear on this web site (ugh).
    • themitigating 5y ago
      Every business exists to make money, the same with most people.
      • randcraw 5y ago
        So no business can exist that seeks something other than money? Non-profits and not-for-profits are not businesses?
        • 20after4 5y ago
          Non profit organizations still need money to operate. They still pay their employees with money. They still must earn revenue somehow to cover their operations, unless they are entirely funded by an endowment. The only difference from for-profit companies is that they don't earn returns for investors.
      • deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
    • dustintrex 5y ago
      Except that this pill won't be given to people unless they're already sick with COVID. Not that this will stop the tinfoil hat brigade, but it's going to be much less controversial than universal vaccine mandates.
• btbuildem 5y ago
  So what's their play here? That those people who refused vaccines will want to take this pill instead?
  • adlorger 5y ago
    yes. many people are vaccine hesitant because they dislike or are afraid of shots. also if this can help impact the rate of hospitalization and death among unvaccinated than it also alleviates the need for actual vaccinations to do the lift of ending the overall pandemic.
  • oblio 5y ago
    "Play"? :-) It's always the same play, they're making medicines to sell them. And vaccinated people can get infected and suffer from serious symptoms. If the entire world were vaccinated and 0.1% of people would have serious symptoms, that would still be more than 8 million people looking for a cure.
• blackbear_ 5y ago
  Note that to make the overall risk of adverse effects from covid19 lower, any treatment that is taken after the onset of symptoms must be much more effective at preventing adverse effects in symptomatic patients compared to a vaccine. This is because the vaccine greatly reduces the probabilty of symptomatic infections, while the other treatments do not.
• zanethomas 5y ago
  aka pfizermectin
• covfa3hah 5y ago
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• covfa3hah 5y ago
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• covfa3hah 5y ago
  Has it ever occurred to you that you are a cock-sucking FAGGOT! COCK-SUCKING FAGGOT! COCK-SUCKING FAGGOT! COCK-SUCKING FAGGOT! COCK-SUCKING FAGGOT! COCK-SUCKING FAGGOT! COCK-SUCKING FAGGOT! COCK-SUCKING FAGGOT! COCK-SUCKING FAGGOT! COCK-SUCKING FAGGOT! COCK-SUCKING FAGGOT! COCK-SUCKING FAGGOT! COCK-SUCKING FAGGOT! COCK-SUCKING FAGGOT! COCK-SUCKING FAGGOT! COCK-SUCKING FAGGOT! COCK-SUCKING FAGGOT! COCK-SUCKING FAGGOT! COCK-SUCKING FAGGOT! COCK-SUCKING FAGGOT! COCK-SUCKING FAGGOT! COCK-SUCKING FAGGOT! COCK-SUCKING FAGGOT! COCK-SUCKING FAGGOT! COCK-SUCKING FAGGOT! COCK-SUCKING FAGGOT! COCK-SUCKING FAGGOT! COCK-SUCKING FAGGOT! COCK-SUCKING FAGGOT! COCK-SUCKING FAGGOT! COCK-SUCKING FAGGOT! COCK-SUCKING FAGGOT! COCK-SUCKING FAGGOT! COCK-SUCKING FAGGOT! COCK-SUCKING FAGGOT! COCK-SUCKING FAGGOT! COCK-SUCKING FAGGOT! COCK-SUCKING FAGGOT! COCK-SUCKING FAGGOT! COCK-SUCKING FAGGOT! COCK-SUCKING FAGGOT! COCK-SUCKING FAGGOT! COCK-SUCKING FAGGOT! COCK-SUCKING FAGGOT! COCK-SUCKING FAGGOT! COCK-SUCKING FAGGOT! COCK-SUCKING FAGGOT! COCK-SUCKING FAGGOT! COCK-SUCKING FAGGOT! COCK-SUCKING FAGGOT! COCK-SUCKING FAGGOT! COCK-SUCKING FAGGOT! COCK-SUCKING FAGGOT! COCK-SUCKING FAGGOT! COCK-SUCKING FAGGOT! COCK-SUCKING FAGGOT! COCK-SUCKING FAGGOT! COCK-SUCKING FAGGOT! COCK-SUCKING FAGGOT! COCK-SUCKING FAGGOT! COCK-SUCKING FAGGOT! COCK-SUCKING FAGGOT!
• covfa3hah 5y ago
  There's that fag talk.
• hungryforcodes 5y ago
  Who cares about the skeptics. Give me the drug if I'm sick. End of story.
• freddealmeida 5y ago
  I don't trust Pfizer in any case. But interesting at least. I think it needs far more study before this is simply introduced into the wild. But what do I know. We have survived for 2m years without this. I'm sure we can be fine without it.
  • dougmwne 5y ago
    Sure, we survived as a species, but certainly not as individuals. We see plenty of evidence of genetic bottlenecks where the human population was reduced to small numbers, quite possibly due to disease. Just within the historical period, there are legions of plagues with extremely high mortality rates, including nearly the entire native population of North America after contact with Europeans. And let’s not forget antibiotics and near every lifesaving piece of medical knowledge we have developed over the last few thousand years. It’s your choice to refuse medical care, but don’t assume the rest of us want to go back to the caves and the hunt. Rapid drug discovery is an extremely powerful medical technology and I 100% welcome it for this disease and all futures ones.
    • proc0 5y ago
      But don't you think it's even a little suspicious other countries have been administering another infamous antiviral that happens to be a generic drug? I mean it's at least a coincidence that pfizer is somehow the one doing all the heavy lifting here... are they that good of a drug company? Aren't there other doctors, virologists, etc out there? I just feel people are too quick to accept a for-profit mega-corporation as the defacto source of all things covid cure.
• rob_c 5y ago
  Grand. Anything which stops the idiots stopping us from getting back on with our lives is good. Not for me thanks, but it gives people options to make decisions for themselves.
  • deworms 5y ago
    By now you should have noticed that you're not "getting back on with your lives" no matter how good a boy you are and how many freedoms you give up. You should have resisted this from the start, this is your choice.
    • dang 5y ago
      Please don't take HN threads further into flamewar. It makes discussions predictable, tedious, and nasty. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    • rob_c 5y ago
      Frankly given the work I've done demonstrating the anti science direction policy has taken and the work I've done to call out the bad "science" since the start you should be thankful for the work I've done. As for further "resistance" as soon as the 5G anti-vax nutters started i started looking out for me by putting money in the bank. My response from idiots insulting me over the last 2 years is too stop carrying about _your_ freedoms being taken. I'm looking out for me and I've had it with people pretending to understand topics without at least reading and properly understanding article summaries...
      • deworms 5y ago
        Hey, we're all in it together. I'm not the one "staying at home" or wearing masks though, so ironically this affects me less than it does you. We don't have any vaccine-related restrictions where I live either.
      • busymom0 5y ago
        >5G anti-vax nutters I have yet to meet anyone who's unvaxxed because they think of some 5g conspiracy. I smell corporate media type elitism in your comment.
• destitude 5y ago
  Is probably just a large dose of vitamin D with other inert ingredients making it patentable. Vitamin D has already had research showing same results but you can't patent Vitamin D alone.
  • stnmtn 5y ago
    Why would you say this without doing any research or looking into this at all? Why just assume this and post it as if your opinion on what it COULD be without even reading a little bit about it has any value?
• TacticalCoder 5y ago
  So no we have the Pfizer vaccine (which I got) who cuts the risk of both catching the virus and the risk of severe complication by a lot (forgot the number but it's big) and in addition to that we now have Pfizer oral medication that can be given to positive cases and which reduces both hospitalization and death risk by 85%. When can life go back to normal?
  • zapdrive 5y ago
    Lol, you think life will go back to normal? That's cute. Just like how airport security went back to normal a few years after 9/11? The powers of the world are not going to let this pandemic go to waste. There's a lot of money to be made and a lot of freedoms to be trampled.
    • dang 5y ago
      Please don't take HN threads further into flamewar. It makes discussions predictable, tedious, and nasty. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Edit: you've been posting like this a lot. Can you please stop that? It's not what this site is for, we ban such accounts, and I don't want to ban you. If you'd please review the guidelines and fix this, we'd appreciate it.
  • thedougd 5y ago
    If the majority of the population is willing to use either, than I expect so.
  • whateveracct 5y ago
    What's so different now exactly? I can go to restaurants, the store, the movies, fly. I gotta wear a mask indoors to some degree, so I guess we're at like 99% normal.
    • topoftheforts 5y ago
      Have you tried travelling abroad? It’s still much more complicated than it was, you have to check both countries requirements, spend money on tests, fill additional forms
• frealy 5y ago
  Friendly reminder Fauci authorized "research" where they physically ripped out puppies vocal chords so they wouldn't have to listen to them cry while they fed their faces to insects and slowly were murdered over the course of 2 weeks: https://www.skynews.com.au/opinion/outsiders/utterly-disgusting-fauci-caught-up-in-cruel-experiments-on-puppies/video/0d85c3aadef571e5ccc07327be122ae7 https://www.skynews.com.au/opinion/outsiders/utterly-disgust... Of course, that isn't even the most grotesque that piece of shit did. They also threw acid on monkey brains to induce terror. Seriously, if you support Fauci - at all - I hope you get shot in the fucking head.
• an9n 5y ago
  What a money spinner eh? Coronavirus really is the gift that keeps on giving...
  • zapdrive 5y ago
    Exactly. Everybody is trying to milk it.
• fredliu 5y ago
  > As a protease inhibitor, Paxlovid is free from the theoretical DNA-alteration risk tied to the mechanism of action of Merck’s molnupiravir. This is the line I was looking for. Not that I know how protease inhibitor works, but looks more like a traditional anti-viral approach v.s. the potentially DNA altering molnupiravir.
  • thehappypm 5y ago
    I doubt we’ll see molnupiravir getting approved in this context now. I think the mechanism just has too much risk.
    • inglor_cz 5y ago
      Already approved in the UK: https://www.bbc.com/news/health-59163899 https://www.bbc.com/news/health-59163899
      • somewhereoutth 5y ago
        Unfortunately in the UK there has been political pressure to do absolutely anything (no matter how questionable - e.g challenge trials) that isn't imposing even the slightest restriction.
        • inglor_cz 5y ago
          Rolling review for the EU is underway. Let's wait how it turns out. https://www.ema.europa.eu/en/news/covid-19-ema-starts-rolling-review-molnupiravir https://www.ema.europa.eu/en/news/covid-19-ema-starts-rollin...
      • thehappypm 5y ago
        The UK is very different from the US. They seem hell-bent on approving everything. Even historically (thalidomide).
    • caleb-allen 5y ago
      Are you a pharmaceutical research scientist?
• barbazoo 5y ago
  > There were six hospitalizations and no deaths among the 607 patients who received Paxlovid within five days of symptom onset, compared to 41 hospitalizations and 10 deaths in the placebo cohort. I know it shouldn't be shocking but it just hit me that being in the control group here is very close to getting a death sentence. I couldn't find it in the article OP shared or the press release, but did the control group get any other treatment?
  • uranium 5y ago
    While I haven't read this particular study, the standard way to do a trial like this is to compare against the current standard of care, not no treatment.
  • jedberg 5y ago
    Usually with these kinds of experiments, you would get all the other normal treatments, because it would be unethical otherwise.
  • xyzzyz 5y ago
    10 deaths in 600 is not quite a death sentence, in my opinion. And yes, placebo group always gets current standard treatment, it would be rather wrong to do otherwise.
    • barbazoo 5y ago
      Not a chance I'd like to take
      • joenot443 5y ago
        For sure, but in this case, not taking the chance guarantees you the "placebo", or standard care, meaning you'd be in the same boat as if you'd entered the study and received the placebo dose.
      • School-Cotton 5y ago
        The alternative is not being in the trial at all.
• jolts 5y ago
  Amazing how many cucks on HN are afraid of a virus with 99.97% recovery rate. Natural immunity > vaccines
  • dang 5y ago
    We've banned this account for posting unsubstantive comments / flamebait. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
• jolts 5y ago
  Also called pfizermectin
• anonuser123456 5y ago
  Does this molecule inhibit replication of related coronaviruses or is it highly specific to SARS-CoV-2?
  • ImaCake 5y ago
    Wikipedia suggests they first tried it on a lethal cat coronavirus. And the enzyme it inhibits, 3CL, is found in all coronaviriae. So one suspects this works against most coronaviruses.
• ammonammonammon 5y ago
  Seems since there are so many unapproved off-label therapeutics and now more and more under-patent money making ones we'll lighted the facist vaccine mandates.
  • rblatz 5y ago
    Vaccine mandates aren’t new, what’s new is the hyper targeting of propaganda meant to incite division.
• cockzor 5y ago
  AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!! PANDEMIC!!!!! AAAAAAAAAHHHHH!!! We're all going to DIE!!!!! AAAAAHHHHHHHH!!! MASsk Up! V4xccC1nATE!!! CLOSE ALLL THE BUSINESSES!!! REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE@@!!!!!
• ImaCake 5y ago
  The press release is much more reader friendly than this re-report of it. https://www.pfizer.com/news/press-release/press-release-detail/pfizers-novel-covid-19-oral-antiviral-treatment-candidate https://www.pfizer.com/news/press-release/press-release-deta...
• docmars 5y ago
  Man, rebranded Ivermectin is pretty great, isn't it? Go figure.
  • pjkundert 5y ago
    Ya, too bad there wasn't any reliable, cheap, readily available potent protease inhibitor available before this. Oh wait...
    • moneywoes 5y ago
      I’m unfamiliar
      • pjkundert 5y ago
        Ivermectin.
• dekhn 5y ago
  Damn, 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-work-dioxygen-difluoride https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/things-i-won-t-wor...
  • whymauri 5y ago
    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.
    • dekhn 5y ago
      it's not hard to find other molecules with similar scaffolds. Simply train an unsupervised network (autoencoder) over SMILES strings taken from ZINC. Convert your molecule of interest to a vector using the encoder, then find N nearest neighbors and decode. Those molecules will likely have similar scaffolds. There are other methods, graph substructure similarity is common. More to your actual question, it was derived from a previous attempt (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lufotrelvir https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lufotrelvir) which has a very similar structure, and I wasn't able to find prior information by doing a little literature searching to see if there are other similar compounds.
      • whymauri 5y ago
        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!
        • dekhn 5y ago
          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.
• arnaudsm 5y ago
  That's great news! But remember that lowering the death rate has a linear effect, while the R0 has an exponential one.
  • School-Cotton 5y ago
    > remember that lowering the death rate has a linear effect Intuitively you would expect that the treatment also lowers the rate of spread.
• jdlyga 5y ago
  This is excellent news. Vaccines and an easy to get prescription treatment like tamiflu are how this stops being a pandemic.
  • gonational 5y ago
    Yeah, this means all the people who waited to see how deadly this brand new technology and "vaccine" was will now know that it was never necessary. Not to mention that the "vaccine" does not prevent the spread, only purportedly reduces the symptoms.
    • School-Cotton 5y ago
      The vaccine neither outright prevents spread nor severe symptoms, but it dramatically reduces the probability of both.
      • gonational 5y ago
        It increased the risk of spread by increasing viral load up to 157 times. This fact is not up for debate.
        • barbs 5y ago
          Do you have a reference for this?
• m0zg 5y ago
  Rejoice, for pfizermectin is now upon us. Did they at least test the study participants for natural immunity ahead of time? In related news, Merck's molnupiravir has been approved in the UK as well.
  • lern_too_spel 5y ago
    Why would that matter? Treatment is randomly assigned.
    • m0zg 5y ago
      Because you can't trust Pfizer, unfortunately. Here's how they run their "studies" nowadays: https://www.bmj.com/content/375/bmj.n2635 https://www.bmj.com/content/375/bmj.n2635. This is just one lab, nobody has come forward (yet) about others, and given that the whistleblower has been fired right away, chances of other whistleblowers coming forward are pretty low. Be that as it may, I regard whatever they say about safety or efficacy of their products the same way I did in 2019 - with extreme suspicion.
      • lern_too_spel 5y ago
        Then your criticism makes even less sense. If they tested for natural immunity, they could put the people who have natural immunity in the vaccine group.
• htpn38 5y ago
  It seems this thread is just a bunch of people using this news as an excuse to criticise people who don't take the vaccine rather than any rational discussion of the topic.
• say_it_as_it_is 5y ago
  It's a wonderful, truly novel new drug they call Pfizermectin