Pfizer-sponsored study finds no benefit in Paxlovid

Pfizer-sponsored study of "patients who are at standard risk for severe Covid-19 or who are fully vaccinated and have at least one risk factor for severe Covid-19" concludes that the efficacy of Pfizer's anti-Covid drug, Paxlovid, "has not been established." 

Pfizer and a Corruption Too Deep to Fix | Epoch Times | Jeffrey A. Tucker: 

April 8, 2024 - "[T]he COVID medication Paxlovid ... was approved under 'emergency use' in December 2021, and trumpeted by [Anthony] Fauci, President Biden, and the rest of the usual crowd. It was 90 percent effective, they said! The White House authorized $11 billion and more to pay for it, and dispatched the whole army of media mavens to push this thing. The White House was able to claim it was free, if you had insurance but even that would last only for so long. Eventually, the consumer had to pay and it was nearly $1,500 for 20 pills....

"Paxlovid was greeted with all the usual hosannas from the drug company as echoed by big media. The drug is 89 percent effective, they kept saying. The governments of Canada, the United States, and the UK all celebrated and showered Pfizer with multiple rounds of billions of dollars.

"But even from the outset, it seems there were many reports of rebounds. The drug would reduce symptoms for a few days even to the point of generating a negative test but then COVID would come back. This happened often enough that pharma skeptics grew deeply suspicious of it, especially because of such a very long run of patented failings in this realm.... 

"Biden, for example, seems to have gotten COVID four times after being treated repeatedly with Paxlovid. So too with Biden’s wife. The same happened with Fauci himself. Most every prominent person reported something similar. But that did not stop the gravy train from running, with the entire medical professional rallying around this drug.

"From the outset, The Epoch Times was reporting skeptically about it, the only media venue to do so. More and more doubts emerged, not in official circles but online in alternative media.

"Now we come to the kicker. Pfizer itself has finally published its randomized placebo-controlled trial of several hundred individuals with the Delta variant, which would have been two and a half years ago. The title of the results as published in the New England Journal of Medicine: 'Nirmatrelvir for Vaccinated or Unvaccinated Adult Outpatients with Covid-19.' Notice the absence of the word Paxlovid, making it all the more difficult for regular people to find. Nirmatrelvir is the clinical name.

"And the conclusion: 'Nirmatrelvir–ritonavir was not associated with a significantly shorter time to sustained alleviation of Covid-19 symptoms than placebo, and the usefulness of nirmatrelvir–ritonavir in patients who are not at high risk for severe Covid-19 has not been established.'

"In other words: this drug does not work. At all. It is no better than nothing. It is not useful. Countless billions later and this is what we have, a completely useless thing. At best.... 

"You will notice that you have not seen this reported in any mainstream media, even though it appears in the top medicine journal in the United States. That’s because the mainstream media is entirely in the pay of pharma. The conspiracy is out in the open, and all official channels are implicated. There seems to be zero accountability or appeal. It’s no wonder that RFK, Jr., is calling for racketeering investigations to be made against the whole industry and its industrial partners. This is aggressive robbery and fraud. Very few people even know to care because they are not being told the brutal facts of the case.

"One also wonders how it is that Pfizer held onto this study for two years before releasing it.

"Why would Pfizer choose just now to announce that its wonder drug is actually useless? My own theory: its accounting ledgers are showing that the drug’s period of high profitability is at an end. There’s no more high-margin profits associated with it. Might as well retire it. With a complicit legacy media, it has no egg on its face. It can just chalk up its wild Paxlovid push as profitable and done, like a seasonal beer or a pumpkin-spice latte. There is essentially no downside to moving onward to other products in its arsenal.

"But think about what this means for this company and for the system that protects it. What does this say about the vaccine? What does it mean for the whole network of protection, from regulators to journals to media? They are all in on the game. And how deep and wide is this game?"

Read more: https://www.theepochtimes.com/opinion/pfizer-and-a-corruption-too-deep-to-fix-5624319

Read study: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2309003

Paxlovid does not lower risk of long-term COVID-19 symptoms, UCSF study shows | ABC7 News Bay Area | January 4, 2024: 

New Covid variant wave met in USA with apathy

Headline, U.S. News & World Report, Apr. 4, 2022

America Is Staring Down Its First So What? Wave | The Atlantic - Katherine J. Wu:

April 5, 2022 - "If the United States has been riding a COVID-19 ’coaster for the past two-plus years, New York and a flush of states in the Northeast have consistently been seated in the train’s front car. And right now, in those parts of the country, coronavirus cases are, once again, going up. The rest of America may soon follow, now that BA.2 — the more annoying, faster-spreading sister of the original Omicron variant, BA.1 — has overtaken its sibling to become the nation’s dominant version of SARS-CoV-2.

"Technologically and immunologically speaking, Americans should be well prepared to duel a new iteration of SARS-CoV-2, with two years of vaccines, testing, treatment, masking, ventilation, and distancing know-how in hand. Our immunity from BA.1 is also relatively fresh, and the weather’s rapidly warming.... But ... the country’s capacity to track the coronavirus is on a decided downswing.... Testing is how individuals, communities, and experts stay on top of where the virus is and whom it’s impacting; it’s also one of the main bases of the CDC’s new guidance on when to mask up again. Without it, the nation’s ability to forecast whatever wave might come around next is bound to be clouded.

"'I keep thinking back to this idea of If we don’t measure it, it won’t happen,' says Shweta Bansal, an infectious-disease modeler at Georgetown University.... In reality, 'it’s very well happening, and we just don’t see it yet.' There is still no guarantee that the next wave is nigh — but if it is, the U.S. is poorly positioned to meet it. Americans’ motivational tanks are near empty.... The next wave may be less a BA.2 wave, and more a so what? wave — one many Americans care little to see, because, after two years of crisis, they care so little to respond.

"Colloquially, epidemiologically, a wave is a pretty squishy term, a 'know it when you see it' notion that gets subjective, fast. 'There is no technical definition,' says C. Brandon Ogbunu, a mathematical modeler studying infectious-disease dynamics at Yale. And with COVID-19, there’s no consensus among experts on exactly when waves begin or end, or how sharp or tall one must be to count.... That makes the start of a wave tough to identify even when testing data abound; no single inflection point guarantees a shift from not a wave to definitely a wave. Technically, the BA.1 wave that reached its zenith in mid-January may not have even ended yet, because experts haven’t decided what threshold it would need to reach to do so.... 

"Watching only the national curve can also be misleading. Country-wide data show only a gargantuan average; these numbers smooth and conceal the case rises that have already been erupting in isolated patchworks. That sort of variability is a product of where humans have carried this new subvariant; of the immune landscape that vaccinations and past versions of the virus have left behind; and of the local defenses, such as masking (or not), that people are leveraging against BA.2....

"And these more regional waves still matter, even if they seem at first easier to ignore. They will, in many cases, mark the places least prepared to weather another surge in infections. Tests, while more abundant, have remained inaccessible to many of those who need them; without tests, treatments, too, will drift out of reach.... Wastewater surveillance, which homes in on virus particles extruded in waste, could help — but these monitoring sides aren’t distributed evenly, either. As things stand, the national map of where the virus is moving is full of blank spots and dark patches. Even unmeasured waves, if they grow big enough, have ways of breaking over us. At worst, the virus could eventually surprise us with a rash of hospitalizations — a sign that the initial bump of cases, one we should have responded to, is already in our rearview mirror.

"Not all case rises have to spell disaster. Since November, when Omicron was first identified, more Americans have been vaccinated for the first time, or boosted, or infected; rapid tests have become more available; and the oral antiviral Paxlovid has hit far more pharmacy shelves. All these factors, plus a springtime flocking into the outdoors, especially in the northern U.S., could help blunt a potential wave’s peak; some may even help uncouple a rise in infections from a secondary surge in hospitalizations and deaths.... It’s certainly a reasonable future to hope for, but not an outcome that can be taken for granted.... 

"Human actions can slow rises in cases. They can also accelerate them. And when infections take off, it’s not always easy to tell who holds the steering wheel — pathogen or host. 'Every outbreak since the beginning of humankind has a behavioral component, an immunological component, and a viral component,' Yale’s Ogbunu told me. 'Where one ends and another begins is never completely clear.' But Americans are too far along in this pandemic, and too familiar with the tools we need to manage it, to shirk culpability entirely."

Read more: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2022/04/ba2-omicron-variant-covid-surge/629474/

Two repurposed drugs recognized to treat Covid

Two years into the Covid19 pandemic, Canadian provincial health authorities have begun repurposing inexpensive, widely available medicines for early outpatient treatment. Ontario is listing fluvoxamine, while Quebec is allowing the OTC sale of paxlovid to Covid-positive patients.

Ontario first in Canada to list fluvoxamine as COVID treatment | The Suburban - Joel Goldenberg:

December 23, 2021 - "Ontario is the first province in Canada to officially declare that the inexpensive anti-depressant fluvoxamine should be under consideration as a way to prevent people with mild cases of COVID-19 from having to be hospitalized. 

Ontario's Science Table says of fluvoxamine, '50 mg PO daily titrated up to 100 mg PO TID for 15 days may be considered for mildly ill patients presenting within seven days of symptom onset. This recommendation is based on very low certainty evidence of reduction in hospitalization, and the need for outpatient treatment options with a reasonable safety profile during an anticipated spike in COVID-19 cases due to the Omicron variant. Pharmacist consultation and outpatient provider follow-up is important to avoid any significant adverse drug interactions with fluvoxamine.'

"Fluvoxamine is sold in pharmacies as Luvox, and has been found in a study to cut COVID hospitalization significantly and can potentially reduce serious illness and deaths if prescribed early enough. As previously reported, the study was published in the medical journal Lancet Global Health, and took a look at results from 1,500 people in Brazil who were diagnosed early with COVID.... Those given fluvoxamine took it 100 mg twice a day for 10 days, and the result was that COVID hospitalization decreased by a third. As well, of those who took the medication, one died, compared to 12 who took the placebo.

"This past January, researchers at McGill University were also looking into fluvoxamine as a way to lessen COVID symptoms. Other universities have studied the drug as well, and it has been endorsed as a treatment by Johns Hopkins University."

Read more: https://www.thesuburban.com/news/city_news/ontario-first-in-canada-to-list-fluvoxamine-as-covid-treatment/article_56c1baa5-5d35-5740-84c0-8ab76ead8e29.html

Pharmacists can provide antiviral | The Suburban - Joel Ceasu:

April 1, 2022 - "Quebec pharmacists can now provide the antiviral Paxlovid ™ without a prescription to symptomatic patients who are at risk of developing complications and who present a positive screening test result for COVID-19.Access to a pharmacist from one of the 1,900 community pharmacies in Quebec will make it possible to offer residents local care and promote faster launch of treatment both for the individual and for the health care system.

"This can reduce the probability of hospitalization by up to 89% for vulnerable patients.... [I]nitiating treatment with Paxlovid ™ must be done within five days of the onset of symptoms. The drug was approved by Health Canada in January. Note that if, two days after the start of treatment, the patient's condition changes unfavorably, the pharmacist must refer them to a doctor or a specialized nurse practitioner. 'It is essential that people who have a condition potentially relevant to the use of Paxlovid TM make sure to quickly undergo a screening test for COVID-19 as soon as the first symptoms appear' reads a Health ministry statement. 'If the result is positive, they should promptly consult a pharmacist, a doctor or a specialized nurse practitioner.'

"If other COVID-19 treatments become available and recommended by the National Institute of Excellence in Health and Social Services (INESSS), pharmacists may also prescribe them. The drug will be available following the positive test or with a prescription from a doctor or a nurse practitioner." 

Read more: https://www.thesuburban.com/news/city_news/pharmacists-can-provide-antiviral/article_15c5a917-7126-571e-ab2f-52fd412c4881.html#tncms-source=block-contextual-fallback