On Tuesday, Pfizer announced additional results from a Phase 2/3 study of it’s COVID-19 treatment, Paxlovid. And those results are good.  For high-risk adults—either older adults or those with secondary conditions such as obesity or high blood pressure—Paxlovid cut rates of hospitalization or death by 88% if administered within five days of the beginning of symptoms. A smaller trial of low-risk adults—who have a lesser chance of going to the hospital in the first place—showed the treatment still reduced hospitalizations by 70%.  The treatment is a mix of two antiviral drugs which can be offered to patients and which can be administered at home, as a pill, rather than requiring injection or an IV by medical personnel.  Perhaps best of all, Pfizer expects these results to be much the same against the fast-spreading omicron variant. That’s because the antibodies created either by past infection or vaccines tend to focus on the spike protein by which the virus is attached to receptor sites on human cells, but that’s not how Paxlovid works. This is a protease inhibitor, which directly attacks the ability of viruses to replicate inside the cell. Changes to the spike protein should not affect that process. According to Pfizer, nirmatrelvir (one of the two ingredients in Paxlovid) has shown consistent antiviral activity against alpha, beta, delta, gamma, lambda, and mu variants. They don’t expect that to change with omicron. Read more