Covid-19
Pfizer says its antiviral pill 89 pc effective in preventing severe Covid
Pfizer has stopped the clinical trial for experimental antiviral pill for COVID-19 before the stipulated period after the drug was shown to reduce by 89 percent the chances of hospitalization or death for adults at risk of developing severe symptoms, the company said.
According to a Reuters report, the results appear to surpass those seen with Merck's pill, molnupiravir, which was shown last month to halve the likelihood of dying or being hospitalized for COVID-19 patients also at high risk of serious illness.
Full trial data is not yet available from both Merck and Pfizer, the report said.
Pfizer applied for emergency use approval with the US Food and Drug Administration in October. The company will provide the finding of the interim trial for its pill which was given in combination with an older antiviral called ritonavirto the agency.
The combination treatment, which will have the brand name Paxlovid, consists of three pills given twice daily, the Reuters report stated.
The trial was conducted on 1,219 patients diagnosed with mild to moderate COVID-19 , who had at least one risk factor for developing severe disease, such as obesity or older age.
It found that 0.8 percent of those given Pfizer's drug within three days of symptom onset were hospitalized and none had died by 28 days after treatment. That compared with a hospitalization rate of 7 percent for placebo patients. There were also seven deaths in the placebo group, the Reuters report stated.
Rates were similar for patients treated within five days of symptoms - 1 percent of the treatment group was hospitalized, compared with 6.7 percent for the placebo group, which included 10 deaths.
"We saw that we did have high efficacy, even if it was five days after a patient has been treated ... people might wait a couple of days before getting a test or something, and this means that we have time to treat people and really provide a benefit from a public health perspective," Annaliesa Anderson, head of the Pfizer program, told Reuters.
Adverse events happened in about 20 percent of both treatment and placebo patients, the company said.
"These data suggest that our oral antiviral candidate, if approved by regulatory authorities, has the potential to save patients' lives, reduce the severity of COVID-19 infections, and eliminate up to nine out of ten hospitalizations," Pfizer Chief Executive Albert Bourla said in a statement.
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