Pfizer’s Paxlovid pill scarcity

The recently approved COVID-19 antiviral pill, Paxlovid, is in short supply in the United States of America, and doctors and patients, alike, struggle to source the medication. Paxlovid was created by Pfizer, an American multinational pharmaceutical company, as the country’s first oral antiviral drug for COVID-19 treatment. According to the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), “The agency has determined that it is reasonable to believe that Paxlovid may be effective for the treatment of mild-to-moderate COVID-19 in authorized patients.”

These patients include “adults and paediatric patients (12 years of age and older weighing at least 40 kilograms or about 88 pounds) with positive results of direct SARS-CoV-2 testing, and who are at high risk for progression to severe COVID-19, including hospitalization or death,” documented the FDA. The antiviral drug is also expected to reduce the rate of hospitalizations and death by nearly 90 per cent, according to trial data.

But with the paucity in pills, patients are at risk of succumbing to the COVID-19 disease because of the increase in infections with the Omicron variant in the US. Recent updates from the World Health Organization (WHO), shows that in the US, between January 3- 13, 2022, there were over 62 million confirmed cases of COVID-19 with more than 800,000 COVID-19 deaths. Additionally, more than 500 million have been vaccinated in the US, since 7 January of this year. 

More people are being hospitalized with COVID-19, hence this contributes to the shortage in the antiviral pill supply. “There’s hardly any of these pill packs around,” says Dr. Eric Topol, executive vice president for research at Scripps Research in San Diego in an interview. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, (CDC), notes that the community transmission of the virus is high. This means that it is hard to track the spread of the virus from one member of the population to the other because of the inability to trace the source of the virus.

The country did not purchase the pills in large quantities early, as it did with the COVID-19 vaccines. In addition, Pfizer’s pills take up to six to eight months to manufacture and the company will only have 250, 000 courses of treatment towards the end of January for patients affected by the virus in the US. The company had earlier delivered around 160,000 doses of the pill in December last year in the US.

Paxlovid was given emergency use authorization (EUA) by the FDA for oral use in late December 2021, with another antiviral pill, Molnupiravir, which is manufactured by pharmaceutical company, Merck. When compared to Paxlovid, the safer drug, Molnupiravir “reduces the rate of hospitalizations in high-risk patients by about 30% and carries some possible side effects,” wrote Andrea Kane and Nadia Kounang, Cable News Network (CNN) reporters.