The American laboratory Pfizer has announced that it has stopped testing its experimental antiviral treatment against COVID-19, when it has shown that it reduces the risk of hospitalization or death by 89% in people likely to develop severe forms of the disease.
Pfizer has said it intends to send provisional data to the US health agency, the FDA, as part of an emergency use request made in October. Pfizer’s anti-COVID capsule is taken in conjunction with an older antiviral therapy called ritonavir.
The 1,219 patients who participated in Pfizer’s clinical trial had moderate forms of COVID-19 and at least one risk factor, such as obesity or age.
According to the study, 0.8% of patients who received Pfizer treatment within 3 days of symptom onset were hospitalized, and none of them died within 28 days. Among the patients who received a placebo, the hospitalization rate was 7%, and 7 of them succumbed to the disease.
The company did not detail the potential side effects of the treatment. He said, however, that side effects occurred in about 20% of cases, whether they were patients who received the treatment or the placebo.
The treatment developed by the Pfizer laboratory thus appears to be more effective than that of Merck, molnupiravir, which reduces by about 50% the probability of hospitalization or death in patients at high risk of developing the disease, according to provisional results from a clinical trial released last month.
Neither company has yet published full data from their clinical trials …
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