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A consensus has emerged among experts who study and treat long Covid: Paxlovid seems to reduce the risk of lingering symptoms among those eligible to take it.
The idea is intuitive, experts say. Paxlovid prevents the coronavirus from replicating, so researchers think it may also reduce the risk of an infection causing inflammation or organ damage, which in turn can lead to chronic illness.
Clinical observations and a large study published in March support that theory. Among the 282,000 people in the study who were eligible for Paxlovid, the drug was associated with a 26% lower risk of long Covid.
Not everyone is a good candidate to take it. If you have liver or kidney disfunction or disease, you can't take it at all. If you take any of 120 different other medications, you probably shouldn't take it. If you have HIV you shouldn't take it. If you're pregnant, you shouldn't take it.
A better option would be to a) avoid being in places where you might be exposed to COVID, b) wear a mask if you are going to be in places where you might be exposed to COVID, c) get vaccinated, thus giving you a better chance that any sickness you do get, will be milder and not need paxlovid in the first place.
"..But doctors who treat people for active Covid infections say they aren’t widely prescribing Paxlovid, since the medication interacts with several common drugs and is only approved for people vulnerable to severe illness — older adults and people with underlying medical conditions..."
I would consider taking it in the event I had a bad case of Covid that lasted over a week. Otherwise, No.
I was in the ER a couple of months ago for covid and asked if they were going to prescribe it for me and they said no, that my case did not seem severe enough, and that many patients had a harder time with the drug than they would have had just riding out the covid.
"On May 25, 2023, FDA approved a New Drug Application (NDA) for Paxlovid for the treatment of mild to-moderate coronavirus disease (COVID-19) in adults who are at high risk for progression to severe COVID-19, including hospitalization or death."
So there's your answer. Long COVID patients aren't usually at risk for hospitalization or death. Maybe when paxlovid is no longer a brand new drug rushed to market with zero long-term safety data, it will be available to a wider audience.
And then like many FDA approved drugs, maybe it will be sold for decades and THEN be found to be dangerous and pulled off the market. Or maybe the inventors will win a Nobel prize decades later, like Satoshi Omura and William C. Campbell who discovered ivermectin and billions of people and uncountable animals have taken it safely for non-covid reasons. Only time will tell!
Last edited by terracore; 10-17-2023 at 10:51 PM..
I saw a report recently on our local CBS TV station affiliate saying that Paxlovid will not be given out for free any longer beginning next year, I think it was. Pfizer announced it would be charging for the medication. The cost of a prescription was more or less speculative, but the news anchors threw out a price of around $400 and change for that. Don't know if that is the retail cost without insurance, or if copays would be much less, or if insurance would pay for it. But considering Paxlovid as a new, brand name drug, I'd think less of the cost would be covered and therefore still pricey to the customer. Even more reason, as I see it, for doctors not to prescribe the stuff.
We didn't even consider Paxlovid when we ( my husband, daughter, and I) got covid in April. We had mild cases as it was, and were much improved within a week. We didn't see much sense in taking the stuff.
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