Long haul relief
Pfizer antiviral lowers risk of long COVID, study finds
Pfizer Inc.’s blockbuster Paxlovid antiviral that lowers rates of illness and death in people infected with the coronavirus also cuts the risk of some symptoms of disabling long COVID, a study found.
Taking the oral medication within five days of testing positive for a SARSCoV-2 infection was linked to a 26% lower risk of lingering post-viral complications, researchers with the Veterans Affairs St. Louis Health Care System said in the study. That equates to 2.3 fewer cases of long COVID
within three months of infection for every 100 patients treated, according to the findings released Saturday on the medRxiv server ahead of publication in a peer-reviewed journal.
The research, based on an analysis of electronic health records in databases maintained by the Department of Veterans Affairs, is the first study to look at Paxlovid’s longer-term effects, said Eric Topol, founder of the Scripps Research Translational Institute in La Jolla, California.
“Before this report, the only way we have known to reduce long COVID was to avoid a COVID-19 infection (100% effective!) and some reduction afforded by prior vaccination and boosters, the level of that protection mostly in the range of 30 to 50%,” said Topol, who wasn’t involved in the study, in a blog post.
Long COVID is estimated to afflict almost 150 million people worldwide and predicted to cost $3.7 trillion in the U.S. alone.
No one knows yet what causes the constellation of long-haul symptoms that the U.S. National Institutes of Health calls post-acute sequelae of COVID-19, or PASC. The NIH is funding a late-stage trial in early 2023 that will test whether Paxlovid, given twice a day for 15 days, can relieve long COVID symptoms.
Paxlovid is authorized by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for treatment of acute COVID-19 illness in people with one or more risk factors for progression to severe disease.
The latest study analyzed electronic health records of users of the VA network, the largest integrated healthcare system in the U.S. Researchers compared 9,217 COVID-19 patients treated with Paxlovid against 47,123 patients who didn’t get the antiviral or antibody treatment within the first month of a SARS-CoV-2 infection.
The Paxlovid study is based on observational findings, which are more prone to bias than a randomized trial, said Bob Wachter, chair of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. Even so, “the results are convincing,” he said.
“Paxlovid uptake remains well below where it should be given its benefits, and these data should convince more doctors to prescribe it and more patients to take it — particularly patients over 60, in whom the benefits in preventing hospitalization and death are best demonstrated,” Wachter said in an email.