The antiviral drugs have helped inspire hope among senior administration officials that the United States will be able to curb the devastating toll from the Delta variant.
The Biden administration plans to pay more than $5 billion for a stockpile of Pfizer’s new Covid-19 pill, enough for about 10 million courses of treatment to be delivered in the next 10 months, according to people familiar with the agreement. Senior federal health officials are counting on the drug to be a powerful weapon against Covid. When given promptly to trial groups of high-risk unvaccinated people who developed symptoms of the disease, the drug sharply reduced the risk of hospitalization and death. Pfizer on Tuesday applied for federal authorization of the drug on an emergency basis. A similar pill developed by Merck and Ridgeback Biotherapeutics could be authorized as soon as early December, meaning pharmacies could have limited supplies on hand in weeks. Pfizer’s treatment is taken as a regimen of 30 pills over five days; Merck’s requires 40 pills over five days. The antiviral drugs have helped inspire hope among senior administration officials that the United States will be able to curb the devastating toll from the Delta variant and its predecessors. Some experts believe the worst of the coronavirus pandemic has passed in the country, in part because more than four out of every five Americans ages 12 and older are at least partly vaccinated. Other say rates of infection have merely plateaued and could easily rebound, especially with the onset of winter. After declining for more than a month, the daily average of cases has started creeping up. “I do think that these new oral antivirals will change the way that Covid is managed,” said Dr. David Dowdy, an associate professor of epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “These will help reduce burden on hospitals and the death toll,” he said, but he added that “even without these pills, those numbers are going down.” The antiviral drugs are a new class of treatment for Covid that is ultimately expected to reach far more patients than others have.
