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by roywiggins 1650 days ago
We are maybe a couple months from Pfizer's new antiviral becoming widely available, and it will probably work for immune compromised people. There's also a recent EUA for a long-acting antibody PrEP injection that should help immune compromised people avoid infection in the first place.

Both of these may be widely available in the US quite soon.
2 comments
wonderwonder 1650 days ago
This is a good response and I think would be something that should be taken into account. I am still not going to start masking again unless a much more severe variant rises but I can understand setting a firm deadline based on an emerging technologies. Issue is that there will never be a 100% solution and some states more willing than others to let mandates run forever. What happens if those emerging technologies are not as effective as hoped? It becomes a slippery slope with the deadline kicked down the road. Personally I think we are all going to get covid eventually in much the same way we all get the flu. Everyone that wanted to get vaccinated (in the US) and boosted has had a chance to do so now. Most Americans that want to avoid human contact can for the most part via amazon and food delivery services, work is obviously a different matter for most people. Perhaps I am selfish which I am open to, but at this point after having taken 3 shots and been very mask conscious for the first ~14 months I am tapped out and willing to roll the dice as the risk ratio seems relatively low to my age group and I have no pre-existing morbidities.
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roywiggins 1650 days ago
The Pfizer data on their new pill Paxlovid is very good. It's not emerging, it's here and will be available to people very soon. We will probably all get covid, wouldn't it be better if we all got it after treatments that cut deaths by 90% are widely available?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2021/12/14/does-pfizer...

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landemva 1650 days ago
The unmentionable and ridiculously safe antiviral is available today. But Ivermectin is cheap so it must not be considered.
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mikeyouse 1650 days ago
If only it worked at all, that'd be a great option.
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landemva 1650 days ago
NIH report says it does.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7539925/ 'Ivermectin is an FDA-approved broad-spectrum antiparasitic agent with demonstrated antiviral activity against a number of DNA and RNA viruses, including severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2).'

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mikeyouse 1650 days ago
That's not an NIH report -- that's a random paper posted on the NIH domain. IVM may have some benefit in countries with parasite problems, unfortunately it doesn't do much in the rest of the world. Has already been discussed to death, there's no conspiracy, everyone would have loved for it to help but it really just doesn't;

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/ivermectin-much-more-t...

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roywiggins 1650 days ago
Yeah, it's so silly. It's not like there aren't studies and doctors willing to investigate cheap, effective treatments for covid with existing drugs.

We know that steroids work because they were studied, they definitely work, they're cheap and now they're the standard of care. Why didn't the anti-ivermectin conspiracy come for dexamethasone? It's left unexplained...

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