Joe Biden Takes Paxlovid, Even Though Doctors Know It Doesn’t Really Work

Joe Biden Takes Paxlovid, Even Though Doctors Know It Doesn’t Really Work

Joe Biden rolls up his sleeve to get a booster dose

He’s vaccinated. He’s boosted. Will Paxlovid help? Probably not.Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images

  • President Joe Biden announced Wednesday that he has COVID-19.

  • The White House says his symptoms are mild, including a runny nose, cough and malaise.

  • He takes the antiviral Paxlovid, but recent studies suggest it’s not a great drug.

A new summer outbreak of COVID-19 has arrived. President Biden announced Wednesday that he has the virus, and he’s in good company.

Test positivity rates are rising across the country, according to the latest data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, with particularly high rates in California, New Mexico and Nevada, where President Biden was traveling on Wednesday.

White House spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre said in a statement Wednesday that the president “received his first dose” of Paxlovid, Pfizer’s antiviral treatment intended to relieve COVID-19 symptoms and make the virus less dangerous for high-risk patients.

But some experts question why you would prescribe this drug, which study after study has shown to be mediocre at best.

  • This does not speed up recovery

  • There is no evidence that this prevents long COVID

  • This doesn’t appear to reduce the chances of a rebound, when the virus springs back into action just as a patient recovers – in fact, it might even be slightly more common for patients on Paxlovid to rebound than others.

Paxlovid appears to have a beneficial effect, but it prevents some hospitalizations in very high-risk patients. But even then, studies suggest it is not an effective drug.

Pfizer’s clinical trial, conducted last April in more than 1,200 patients, suggested that taking Paxlovid might prevent some hospitalizations in the most fragile and vulnerable patients, but it’s hard to say. Five patients taking Paxlovid in that study were hospitalized or died. In the control group (who didn’t take Paxlovid), the figure was 10. The difference wasn’t even statistically significant.

Paxlovid did appear to shorten hospital stays in the Pfizer study and reduce intensive care unit visits. But other research from the United Kingdom, published in May, showed absolutely no difference in mortality between hospitalized patients taking paxlovid and those not taking the drug.

Emergency physician Jeremy Faust told readers of his Inside Medicine blog in June that “we should prepare for the possibility” that future studies “will show that Paxlovid is now completely unable to reduce hospitalizations or deaths, or that at best it does so modestly for a small group of very high-risk patients.”

At the beginning of the COVID-19 outbreak, Paxlovid seemed like a better drug. But it doesn’t do much for us today.

“It’s not that Paxlovid doesn’t work anymore,” Faust said. “It’s just that in 2024, relatively few people still seem to actually need it to stay alive or stay out of the hospital.”

There is already another antiviral drug for Covid-19 in China, called Simnotrelvir, which appears to help alleviate the milder initial symptoms of the disease. But it is not yet clear how well it might help the most vulnerable patients, and it is not available in the United States anyway.

Pfizer stands behind Paxlovid. In a statement, a spokesperson told BI: “We remain highly confident in the clinical efficacy of PAXLOVID to prevent severe outcomes from COVID-19 in patients at increased risk.”

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