Your argument has now went from: significant portion of the population aren't eligible, to: doctors might hesitate to prescribe it to old people because old peo

Your argument has now went from: significant portion of the population aren't eligible, to: doctors might hesitate to prescribe it to old people because old people can't follow instructions. We were talking about a hypothetical situation where someone is scared because they high risk. The Doctor can A--tell that person to change their medication (they don't have to stop statins, not all statins can't be taken with Paxlovid) for 2 weeks and take Paxlovid. Or B they can take Molnupiravir, which worst case doesn't do much, and best case is much less effective than Paxlovid. Also Molnupiravir has mutagenic effects (which granted probably aren't as much of a concern for someone 65+). Molnupiravir was approved based on early data that showed it was much more effective than it has proven to be, and at a time when Paxlovid production hadn't ramped up yet. It very likely wouldn't be approved if it were being evaluated today. Based on it's potential to produce more variants, and it's not widely studied mutagenic effects, keeping it around because some doctors might hesitate to prescribe Paxlovid to a subset of old people seems less than ideal.