The death of Covid - Pfizer Says Pill Is 89% Effective in Study - MSN

  Pfizer Inc. said a preliminary look at study results found that its experimental pill was highly effective at preventing people at high risk of severe Covid-19 from needing hospitalization or dying, the latest encouraging performance for an early virus treatment.

The company’s drug [called Paxlovid] cut the risk of hospitalization or death in study subjects with mild to moderate Covid-19 by about 89% if they took the pill within three days of diagnosis ...

Pfizer plans to ask the Food and Drug Administration to authorize the drug’s use this month, and the company could deliver doses this year, should regulators give a thumbs-up ...

If authorized, there could be two Covid-19 pills that people could take at home before the end of the year to keep them out of the hospital. An antiviral from Merck & Co. and Ridgeback Biotherapeutics LP [called Molnupiravir] was cleared for use in the U.K. this week and is up for U.S. authorization.

... Molnupiravir, was found in an .. early study .. to reduce the risk of hospitalization or death in people with mild to moderate Covid-19 by about 50% ...

Doctors and health authorities have struggled with few options for treating patients, especially early in the disease. The antiviral Remdesivir, from Gilead Sciences Inc., is primarily used to treat hospitalized patients, and antibody treatments for recently diagnosed patients must be administered in doctors’ offices, clinics and hospitals. ...

The drug was shown to be active against variants, including the highly contagious Delta, in laboratory testing, Pfizer said. The company plans to share in the future how the drug fared against variants in the study, a spokeswoman said.

People could take Pfizer’s drug, like the Merck-Ridgeback pill, at home when they first develop Covid-19 symptoms. Researchers designed Pfizer’s pill to stop the coronavirus from spreading in people by blocking activity of a key enzyme that the virus needs to replicate.

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