U.S has pre-purchased 10 million treatments of the anti-HIV pill COVID-19 manufactured by Pfizer, which this Wednesday received emergency authorization from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the country’s regulatory body.
This was confirmed by the head of the White House working group against the pandemic, Jeff Zients, who considered the authorization granted to the pill to be good news.
The official stressed that this treatment “drastically reduces” the possibility of hospitalizations and deaths “for people at risk.”
Zients estimated that some 265,000 treatments will be available in January and that the 10 million treatments will be delivered by the end of the summer, as production takes “between six and eight months.”
The Pfizer pill is the first oral anti-COVID treatment that Americans will be able to take at home and is expected to become a crucial tool against the pandemic at a time when cases have skyrocketed from the omicron variant.
Until now, all treatments in the United States against the disease were administered through an injection or intravenously.
The pill, which will be sold under the name Paxlovid, can only be bought with a prescription and patients should take it as soon as they know they have the disease, at most within the first five days in which they have presented symptoms, detailed the FDA in its statement.
The pill works by blocking the activity of a specific enzyme that the coronavirus needs to replicate in the infected body, a mechanism similar to that of the pill developed by another major pharmaceutical company, MSD (Merck in the US and Canada).
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