Paxlovid efficacy is waining with new strains.
You may have recovered quickly regardless.
I never took paxlovid and my covid symptoms lasted 2 days and i recovered quickly.
N = 1 experiences arent convincing data.
You may have recovered quickly regardless.
I never took paxlovid and my covid symptoms lasted 2 days and i recovered quickly.
N = 1 experiences arent convincing data.
Well, quite.
Of the four confirmed Covid cases we've had in our immediate family in the last 12 months, three of us took nothing stronger than standard painkillers and didn't even need to speak to a doctor; my OH spoke to our doctor and was given an inhaler to help with the cough.
https://www.empr.com/home/news/drugs-in-the-pipeline/mixed-r...
So, it's not a strong enough or consistent enough difference between treatment and placebo to be certain that it isn't just chance. (this could happen if for example if out of our 1000 data points, 2 people on placebo were hospitalised but only 1 on the treatment was hospitalised. That'd be "a 50% reduction in risk", but not be statistically significant since it could easily have just been random chance when we're talking about such a small difference).
Probably needs an even larger sample population to really nail down whether it's real or not. Seems suggestive that all the various reported tests showed (inconclusive) benefits when you'd expect an actually-ineffective treatment to show results varying randomly in both "effective" and "not-effective" directions, though that could certainly be positive reporting bias, especially since it's being run and reported by a company with a financial stake in the results.
But since we know the strains have changed over time it seems the most reasonable explanation as to why efficacy has dropped off.
Then the secondary analysis of another 1163 patients failed to show a difference AND the delta between the two arms was smaller than the first analysis.
Its trending towards no difference between arms.
And symptom relief has a huge subjective aspect to it since it based on a patient questionnaire.
If it shows no difference in hospitalization or death but some small effect on symptoms it has little value as a treatment. It going to end up like Tamiflu.
And i just checked clinicaltrials.gov, Pfizer terminated the trial.
This study just isn't powered well enough to say for sure whether Paxlovid provides a hospitalization/death benefit or not for the standard risk group. It also doesn't really provide any good information about whether newer variants cause Paxlovid to work better or worse.