Apart from Novavax approval (ATAGI still needs to sign-off), the TGA approved the covid antivirals from Pfizer and Merck.
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Pfizer’s Paxlovid and Merck Sharp & Dohme’s Lagevrio are the first oral medicines for the virus to be approved for use in Australia by the TGA.
Around 800,000 courses of the anti-viral pills are expected to arrive in the country in the coming weeks.
Each medication is a five-day course, with pills taken twice a day, for people with a mild to moderate case of COVID.
The TGA emphasised that these treatments are not a replacement for vaccinations. which remain the most effective way to prevent severe illness and death from COVID.
“Either medicine should be administered as soon as possible after diagnosis of COVID-19 and within 5 days of the start of symptoms,” it said.
Not only that, but if the pills are well accepted (i.e. minimal side-effects) it could be a case of starting treatment in a suspected high-risk case prior to PCR confirmed disease. Especially if someone is already symptomatic.
They are expensive(ish) at around US$500-725 per course of treatment, so they aren’t going to be handed out willy-nilly I wouldn’t have thought. But if given to people deemed at high-risk of hosp/ICU early enough, US$500-725 is a hell of a lot cheaper (to the Government/health system) than a stay in a ward or in ICU.
In response to some of the back and forth going on today, I think there’s lots our governments could have done earlier on to slow down case numbers. But little they could do now that would make a massive difference. They modelled less cases, but more hospitalisations and more deaths than we’ve had, and they look to have peaked and be on the way down again. They were comfortable with worse than we’ve experienced, and to be fair, hospitalisations and deaths could have been worse than their worst case scenarios, so they took a pretty big risk, that I was pretty uncomfortable with them taking early on. In my opinion, they (we?) got lucky.
Our cases per capita were always going to be world-beating, as we had next to no natural immunity in the community prior to this wave. Fortunately, we started from a high level of vaccination, and have a decent public health system. We understand the progression of the disease fairly well now, and have several treatments that can be employed for bad cases.
I’m more interested in what we do from here, than what we failed to do already though. Currently we’re heading toward kids going back to school, and talked big about mitigations to keep face to face learning safe, like HEPA filters in class rooms, yet if our track record is anything to go by, we won’t see nearly as many of those as we should.
In short, I’d rather focus on what we could and should do from now on to best navigate our way out, than bemoaning what has already happened.
