Oct. 17, 2023 – The U.S. government has returned millions of doses of the COVID-19 antiviral medicine Paxlovid to its manufacturer.
The move is widely expected to raise the price of the treatment, but the government and Pfizer agreed on measures to reduce out-of-pocket costs through the year 2028. The government’s price per course of the treatment was $530, and one analyst told CNN that the price could rise to as much as $2,500 on the private market. The result may be a copay for people who have private insurance.
The return is worth $4.2 billion, Pfizer said, although the deal won’t involve any cash changing hands because the drugmaker will instead provide Paxlovid at no cost to people with Medicaid, Medicare, or to those who don’t have insurance through 2024. Pfizer will also offer a copay assistance program through 2028, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services announced. The new plan, which will go into effect in November, also provides a government stockpile of enough Paxlovid to treat 1 million people “to ensure preparedness for future COVID-19 surges,” the HHS statement explained.
Paxlovid is an antiviral treatment that works by blocking the virus that causes COVID from replicating and infecting healthy cells. A large trial of unvaccinated adults who took Paxlovid within 5 days after the start of symptoms showed the treatment significantly reduced the risk of hospitalization or death from COVID, according to a federal summary.
The treatment is currently recommended for people with COVID who are at a high risk of having a severe case of the illness, such as people who are age 50 or older; are unvaccinated or not up to date on boosters; or have certain medical conditions like asthma or cancer, or some lifestyle behaviors like smoking.
A new CDC analysis presented at the IDWeek conference in Boston last week showed that high-risk adults who were 50 or older were less likely to get long COVID if they took Paxlovid, compared to older people at high risk who didn’t take the medicine. The study compared the risk of post-COVID conditions between people ages 12 and older who did and did not take Paxlovid. All of the people were at high risk for severe cases of COVID and were treated between April and August 2022.
While Paxlovid appeared to offer long-term protection for older people, children ages 12 to 17 years old who took Paxlovid had a slightly increased risk of post-COVID conditions, including high blood pressure, asthma, and type 2 diabetes, Medpage Today reported. Paxlovid is approved for pediatric use for those age 12 and older at high risk for severe illness from COVID.
The study showed that people ages 18 to 49 years old had a mostly neutral risk of post-COVID conditions after taking Paxlovid.
“Among younger adults and adolescents, associations were observed for only certain conditions. This may be due to a difference in baseline health in these age groups,” the study authors wrote, noting that further research is needed to examine the differences.