The China puppet and World Health Organization’s Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus called on Pfizer Tuesday to make its Paxlovid pill more available to poorer countries despite reports of recurring Covid-19 symptoms shortly after recovering from taking the pill.
Pfizer’s Paxlovid became the first US authorized home COVID-19 treatment. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued an emergency use authorization for Pfizer’s antiviral pill to treat mild-to-moderate COVID-19 infections in December.
As the Gateway Pundit previously reported, there are more and more reports of patients taking Pfizer’s antiviral pill experiencing a second round of Covid-19 shortly after recovering.
U.S. Food and Drug Administration said last week that using Pfizer’s Paxlovid pill has “no evidence of benefit at this time for a longer course of treatment” in patients with recurrent Covid-19 symptoms, contradicting Pfizer’s CEO Albert Bourla’s comments.
“We are continuing to review data from clinical trials and will provide additional information as it becomes available. However, there is no evidence of benefit at this time for a longer course of treatment (e.g., 10 days rather than the 5 days recommended in the Provider Fact Sheet for Paxlovid) or repeating a treatment course of Paxlovid in patients with recurrent COVID-19 symptoms following completion of a treatment course,” according to John Farley, director of the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) Office of Infectious Diseases.
Pfizer announced last month that a recent trial study revealed its antiviral pill Paxlovid was not effective at preventing Covid-19 infection in adults who had been exposed to the virus through household contact.
“In this trial, compared to placebo, Pfizer observed risk reductions of 32% and 37% in adults who received PAXLOVID for five and ten days, respectively, to prevent infection. These results, however, were not statistically significant and, as such, the primary endpoint of reducing the risk of confirmed and symptomatic COVID-19 infection in adults who had been exposed to the virus through a household contact was not met,” the news release stated.
Despite all the facts and recent findings regarding the controversial Paxlovid pill, WHO urges Pfizer to make its Covid pill more widely available to poorer countries.
AP reported.
The head of the World Health Organization called on Pfizer to make its COVID-19 treatment more widely available in poorer countries, saying Tuesday that the pharmaceutical company’s deal allowing generic producers to make the drug was insufficient.
WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said during a news briefing that Pfizer’s treatment was still too expensive. He noted that most countries in Latin America had no access to Pfizer’s drug, Paxlovid, which has been shown to cut the risk of COVID-19 hospitalization or death by up to 90%.
Pfizer signed an agreement in November with the U.N.-backed Medicines Patent Pool to allow other drugmakers to make generic copies of its pill, for use in 95 countries. Some large countries that suffered devastating COVID-19 outbreaks, like Brazil, were not included.
Tedros said the deal does not go far enough and called for Pfizer to lift its geographic restrictions on where the generic version of Paxlovid might be used, as well as to make the pill less costly for developing countries.
The U.S. paid about $500 for each course of Pfizer’s treatment, which consists of three pills taken twice a day for five days. Its price in developing countries has not yet been confirmed.
WHO’s chief scientist Dr. Soumya Swaminathan said most of the world’s supply of Pfizer’s drug had already been booked by rich countries, similar to how they hoarded the vast majority of last year’s coronavirus vaccines.