Pill against COVID will be scarce in an initial stage

Like COVID-19 testing sites and vaccines, the supply of pills for the treatment of COVID-19 will be in short supply for months until production can increase.

Federal distribution to US states will be population-based, and will likely depend on prescribing physicians Paxlovid from Pfizer Inc .. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) said they will publish recommendations on how to assign treatments.

New York will receive only 3,180 full treatments of the recently approved COVID-19 pill for the state’s roughly 20 million residents when the U.S. government begins distributing them on a per capita basis next week, according to a breakdown of the distribution. from the US Department of Health and Human Services.

Wyoming, which has about half a million residents, will receive just 100 full doses, similar to smaller states like Vermont and Delaware. California, the most populous state in the United States will get 6,180.

“The product will be limited at the beginning and will increase significantly in the coming months”Said the department. “About 65,000 initial Paxlovid treatments will be available for shipment to states and territories and will begin arriving at dispensing sites in late December. “

The United States will have 265,000 complete treatments of Pfizer for the end of January and 10 million for July. It will also have 3 million from Merck & Co.’s COVID-19 pill, developed with partner Ridgeback Biotherapeutics LP, by the end of January.

Jeff Zients, President Joe Biden’s COVID-19 Response Coordinator, said the Pfizer pill takes six to eight months to make.

“Now that the pill is licensed, we will have discussions to explore how we can help them further improve their manufacturing capacity by providing the necessary resources.Zients said at a press conference on Wednesday.

Doctors will look for the Merck pills and Pfizer to fill a gap for high-risk patients, who have so far been treated with monoclonal antibody therapies to avoid needing hospital care.

Some of the most widely used antibody treatments in Eli Lilly & Co. Y Regeneron Pharmaceuticals Inc. they appear much less effective against omicron than previous variants because they target regions of the virus’ spike protein that have changed during evolution.

Biden, speaking in an interview with ABC News on Wednesday, said that “it will be a matter of weeks to a month to get the pills, but it will not be enough to reach all the hospitals”. He said that the Government ordered “lots of pills, all they can do so far”.