by Greg Piper
“If it’s Covid, Paxlovid.”
There may be a reason why Pfizer chose this compelling slogan on their website advertisements from drug manufacturers, from which it was once impossible to escape for an oral antiviral drug for Covid-19 – topic a “Saturday Night Live” parody — costing U.S. taxpayers at least $12 billion before the feds tightened scrutiny last fall Pfizer raised the price to $1,390 for a five-day course.
A combination of nirmatrelvir and ritonavir sold under the name Paxlovid works no better against so-called long Covid-19 than a placebo taken with ritonavir, according to a up-to-date study. The “original investigation” was quietly published on Friday IN JAMA Internal Medicine, published by the Journal of the American Medical Association.
The 15-day course showed no statistically significant differences in “improvement in fatigue, brain fog, body aches, cardiovascular symptoms, shortness of breath, or gastrointestinal symptoms” in a randomized clinical trial of 155 participants with “post-acute sequelae of SARS-CoV-2 “infection,” reports Stanford Medicine, of which all but two were vaccinated.
In February, the Biden administration allocated another $515 million to study the biologically elusive and highly subjective condition, on top of the $1.15 billion allocated for 2020. STAT reported. The The CDC’s internal log says last year at George Washington University near the White House, the Covid-19 case rate was 36%.
Paxlovid’s results are even worse for Pfizer than they first appear because ritonavir “is actually a harmful product when taken by someone who doesn’t need it,” it says. Epidemiologist at the University of California, San Francisco, Vinay Prasadwhich one before criticized the decision to combine a placebo with an HIV/AIDS drug.
The authors of the study, which included three Pfizer employees, tried to downplay their findings, even noting that symptoms improved in both the intervention and control groups.
“It is important to emphasize that this study alone does not rule out NMV/r as a potential therapy for PASC,” they wrote. “PASC is likely not a single disease entity and therefore treatment will likely vary depending on the PASC subtype.”
This is the latest research problem for the Biden administration, which could also affect the second Trump administration, which has spent billions developing and purchasing pricey Covid drugs based on assumptions that were not incorporated into clinical trials.
Meanwhile, Covid-19 treatments that are expected to be suppressed by the Biden White House, public health agencies and social media platforms are getting a second look.
Journal Clinical infectious diseases he has not yet corrected the lie in the widely cited article 2021 “Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis” of Ivermectin in the treatment of COVID that all five RCTs showed no effect on all-cause mortality.
One of them, published in Asia-Pacific Journal of Tropical Medicineactually showed an average mortality of 3.3 percent in the “ivermectin-treated arms” and 18.3 percent in the “standard treatment and placebo arms.”
March article in Japanese Journal of Antibioticstagged by “The times of the era”, said the CID did not correct the paper even after the RCT author complained that it caused his results to be reversed. – reported Oxford University Press, which publishes CID Only News to ask the magazines’ advertising department for a response, which had not come by Tuesday evening.
Yuhong Dong, former “pharmacovigilance leader” at Novartis, wrote in: Times in April it ivermectin trials ‘designed to fail’ underdosing patients and telling them to take it on an empty stomach, which inhibits the absorption of ivermectin, although its manufacturer Merck claims that eating a “high-fat meal” first leads to a “2.5-fold increase in bioavailability” compared to “the fasted state” “.
Covid-19 vaccines have never been studied for their ability to prevent infection and transmission of SARS-CoV-2, yet officials from then-Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Rochelle Walensky to President Biden continued to make faith-based claims long after the breakthrough infections. known to Walenski until January 2021 – it became clear.
Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee last month threatened to subpoena the CDC for vaccine effectiveness data after the agency “provided only cursory answers” to questions from Administrative Status Subcommittee Chairman Thomas Massie in October and December letters and in 37 “substantive” pages, omitting “fragments of e-mail correspondence” it had previously prepared.
The Kentucky Republican said the CDC refused to correct the claim that the vaccines were “92 percent effective” in people with prior infection, which is not based on the Pfizer trial data or the Food and Drug Administration’s analysis of it. , New York Post Office reported.
We know the officials @CDCgov lied about the effectiveness of vaccines and natural immunity.
I said @HHSGov Deputy Secretary Egorin that further concealment of information about this cover-up is unjustified. pic.twitter.com/po8nWRFLvf
— Thomas Massie (@RepThomasMassie) May 20, 2024
One of President Biden’s first acts in office was: purchase of another 200 million doses of the mRNA vaccine replenish the $400 million provided by his predecessor, with the goal of making two-dose drugs available to all 300 million Americans by summer 2021.
The approved vaccines from Pfizer, Moderna and Novavax for 2023-2024 target long-outdated Omicron variant, XBB line. From May 14 this year The CDC recommends one dose the latest preparation for everyone over 5 years of age, possibly more for children under 5 years of age to “keep up to date” and another dose every four months for people over 65 years of age.
A week later, researchers from the University of Oxford published a pre-print study of English children aged 5–15, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, and found that myocarditis and pericarditis occurred only in vaccinated children, which contradicts mainstream medical claims that Covid-19 itself poses a greater risk of heart inflammation. Their vaccinations provided “transient” protection against infection.
According to the report, the Biden administration has spent more than $12 billion on Paxlovid through early December 2022 Reuters report then. Pfizer nets $18.9 million from Paxlovid in 2022 placed under emergency operate authorization, months before full FDA approval.
Pfizer was revealed in October Reached an agreement with the federal government to make Paxlovid available free of charge to federally insured patients through 2024 and to uninsured or underinsured patients through 2028.
According to a study by Pfizer, the two-drug cocktail actually proved more effective in unvaccinated high-risk groups than the Pfizer vaccine. Studies 2022 in Clinical infectious diseases.
President Biden, then-COVID adviser Anthony Fauci, first lady Jill Biden and Walensky everyone got a rebound infection. however, at Paxlovid rates between the initial federal purchase and the repurchase in slow 2022. A study by General Mass Brigham in Annals of internal medicine last fall found a 20 percent reflectance rate for “spreading live and potentially infectious virus.”
Fauci ignored FDA guidelines taking the second course after being recommended by Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla the agency soon ordered Pfizer to conduct just such a study.
The White House cited Paxlovid’s alleged 90% reduction in the risk of hospitalization or death boasting two years ago that it had committed to purchasing 20 million courses, “more than in any other country in the world,” failing to note that he was citing an RCT conducted by Pfizer that did not include the enormous majority of Americans at the time.
In the April issue of RCT magazine, emergency medicine physician Matt Bivens described problems with Paxlovid in research and practice, including its up-to-date market price above gold and a “appalling conflict of interest” with Pfizer running the RCT. Emergency medicine news.
The main claim of supporters is that Paxlovid is “stunningly effective” and “saving lives” – a term used by General Mass Brigham to downplay the rebound rate – is based on Pfizer RCT known as EPIC-HR conducted during the 2021 Delta variant wave and published in the New England Journal of Medicine in February 2022, Bivens said.
Like the White House, The CDC touted the study in its internal journal – which is not peer-reviewed – not to mention that it was run by Pfizer, and claimed that the literature showed no “consistent link between” the “life-saving” treatment and disease relapse.
Pfizer drastically circumscribed the study’s usefulness by excluding people with “previously confirmed SARS-CoV-2 infection” and unvaccinated people. Although eligible patients received treatment within five days of symptom onset, Pfizer inexplicably narrowed the population even further by only analyzing patients treated within three days, Bivens stressed.
Pfizer did not respond to questions Monday and Tuesday about its response to the criticism.
The Cochrane research team identified 13 ongoing studies of Paxlovid and three ‘awaiting classification’, in addition to the Pfizer RCT and the Chinese Lancet test “hospitalized adult patients with serious comorbidities” in: a November systematic review.
The only thing researchers could say about unvaccinated high-risk outpatients was that Paxlovid “may” reduce deaths and “improve patient outcomes,” but that it “likely… has little effect on any adverse events” and increases “adverse events related to treatment.” They are “very uncertain” about what this means for hospitalized patients.
Several of the identified studies, including three more EPIC studies, are “supported by Pfizer” and yet “have fallen on the radio,” Bivens wrote. It’s as if Pfizer were to “fund 20 studies, keep quiet about 19 of them, and hype 20 of them” in a prestigious journal “along with an endless stream of low-quality observational data” to gain uncritical media attention, he said.
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Greg Piper is a reporter for Just the News.
Photo “Pfizer Research Laboratory” by Pfizer.
