Belgium agrees to buy 10,000 doses of COVID-19 pills from Pfizer and Merck

Belgium has agreed to buy 10,000 doses of each of the COVID-19 oral antiviral treatments developed by Pfizer and Merck & CO, a Ministry of Health spokesperson told Reuters in an emailed statement Monday.

Governments around the world are rushing to buy Paxlovid, the pill developed by Pfizer.

Molnupiravir, jointly developed by Merck and Ridgeback Biotherapeutics, is facing setbacks following disappointing trial data, and France said in December it had canceled its order for the drug.

The Belgian health minister said in early December that the government was in talks with Merck to buy molnupiravir, and Belgian health authorities had advised that both molnupiravir and Paxlovid be purchased.

“The talks have ended and we will buy 10,000 units of both”, Declared on Monday to Reuters Arne Brinckman, spokesman for the Belgian Ministry of Health, when asked about the possible purchase of courses of both treatments.

The Pfizer regimen consists of three pills in the morning and three in the evening.

The Merck drug is taken as four pills in the morning and four in the evening.

The EU medicines regulatory body has not authorized either, but has issued advice on using both as emergency treatments, at a time when the bloc is facing an exponential increase in cases caused by the omicron variant of the coronavirus, highly contagious.

The spokesperson did not respond to a request to indicate how much Belgium had agreed to pay, and did not say when the country expected to receive the first cycles.

In late December, France said it had canceled its order for 50,000 cycles of molnupiravir after the company released data in late November that suggested its drug was notably less effective than previously thought, reducing hospitalizations and deaths in its clinical trial of high-risk individuals by about 30%.

Pfizer said that Paxlovid was close to 90% effective in preventing hospitalizations and deaths in high-risk patients, and laboratory data suggests that the drug remains effective against the contagious omicron variant of the coronavirus.

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