![]() “Medicine is about weighing costs and benefits,” Wachter said. Anthony Fauci, another White House adviser, who’s 81, contracted Covid in June and then took Paxlovid, he experienced a rebound - and also believed that the drug kept him out of the hospital. Many doctors are evidently worried about side effects or rebound cases among their more vulnerable patients.Įven in rebound cases, however, symptoms tend to be milder than they would have been without Paxlovid. is now receiving the drug than 45-year-olds with Covid, according to data he has seen. Perhaps the most shocking statistic about Paxlovid’s underuse - and Jha used the word “shocking” when describing it to me - is that a smaller share of 80-year-olds with Covid in the U.S. ![]() And yet the Epic data showed that only about 25 percent of patients eligible to receive Paxlovid actually did, even though the drug is widely available and free for patients. The death rate for patients who did not get the drug was more than four times higher, or 0.070 percent. For others, the benefit is massive.” (People who can’t take Paxlovid because it interacts dangerously with another drug they’re taking can usually take monoclonal antibodies.)Ī recent analysis of about 568,000 patients by Epic Research found that 0.016 percent of Covid patients over 50 who received Paxlovid died. “I think almost everybody benefits from Paxlovid,” Jha said. The Covid death rate for people under 50 is already so close to zero that reducing it in a statistically significant way is difficult. Some research finds an effect across all age groups, while other research finds one only among older patients. With Paxlovid, both randomized trials and data from electronic health records have pointed to its effectiveness. It does so by inhibiting the virus’s replication inside the human body, the same process that has made H.I.V. Covid is a deadly virus, especially for older people, and Paxlovid reduces Covid’s severity. Most prominently, people who take Paxlovid can endure “rebound” Covid - as both President Biden and Jill Biden did - in which symptoms return after the five-day course of pills has ended.Īll of this is true. (One member of my family described it as among the worst tastes she had ever experienced.) Some research has also found that the drug might not cause a statistically significant reduction in hospitalization among younger adults. ![]() The drug can produce a metallic taste in the mouth. Bad-news biasīy now, you have surely heard about the downsides and shortcomings of Paxlovid. “The public doesn’t seem to understand that the evidence around hospitalization and deaths is really powerful,” Wachter said. Robert Wachter, the chair of the medicine department at the University of California, San Francisco, told me that he thought the underuse of Paxlovid was already associated with thousands of preventable deaths in the U.S. Rebecca Wang, an infectious disease specialist at Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center, has said: “Never really in recent history for a respiratory virus can I think of an anti-viral medication being as effective, demonstrated in scientific literature, as what Paxlovid has shown.”ĭr. He predicted that if every American 50 and above with Covid received a course of either Paxlovid or a treatment known as monoclonal antibodies, daily deaths might fall to about 50 per day, from about 400 per day in recent months.ĭr. Ashish Jha, the White House Covid response coordinator, told me. ![]() “A large chunk of deaths are preventable right now with Paxlovid alone,” Dr. Today’s newsletter will dig into both issues. The second explanation is that many Americans, especially Republicans, still do not take Covid seriously. The first is that the public discussion of them has tended to focus on caveats and concerns, rather than on the overwhelming evidence that they reduce the risk of hospitalization and death. There seem to be two main explanations for the drugs’ underuse. Until then, other Times journalists will be writing The Morning, and I look forward to reading their work along with all of you.Ī worrisome pattern has emerged with Paxlovid and other drugs that reduce the severity of Covid: Many people who would benefit most are not receiving the treatments, likely causing hundreds of unnecessary deaths every day in the U.S. First, a programming note: This is my last newsletter before starting a book leave. ![]()
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