Reports from two Covid-19 patients, including an immunologist, of symptom relief after taking Pfizer’s Covid-19 drug Paxlovid could lead to clinical trials to help patients, experts say. The US doctor said his chronic fatigue syndrome, which felt “like a truck had hit me”, disappeared after taking the two-pill combination.
Long Covid is another looming health crisis in the coronavirus pandemic, with up to 30% of people infected with SARS-CoV-2 estimated to be affected once the acute illness has resolved. More than 200 symptoms have been associated with Long Covid, including pain, fatigue and exhaustion from light physical activity, brain fog and breathing difficulties. These can last for months, and many of those affected are unable to work.
Paxlovid and Long Covid: Strong evidence
Steven Deeks, an associate professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) and an expert in HIV research, said pharmaceutical companies tend to disregard studies of individual patients. But these cases would also have helped advance the cure for HIV. Deeks believes Paxlovid could do the same for Long Covid. There is strong evidence that antiviral therapy needs to be investigated in this context as soon as possible, the doctor said, adding that he had already heard of a third case in which a patient’s recurrent Covid-19 symptoms disappeared after taking Paxlovid.
Other scientists caution that these cases are “merely hypothesis generators” and do not prove that the drug has achieved relief from persistent symptoms. But they support a leading theory that Long Covid could be caused by the virus that persists for months in parts of the human body, affecting the lives of patients long after the acute symptoms have disappeared. Michael Stingl, a neurologist and leading expert on Covid-19 in Austria, assesses these early case reports equally positively, but also believes that more data or more comprehensive studies are needed on this topic, as he recently wrote on Twitter:
Persistent inflammation after Covid-19 infection?
The best evidence so far comes from a study (currently under peer review) by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH). To do this, the researchers performed autopsies on 44 people who died from or with Covid-19. They found widespread infection throughout the body, including the brain, which can persist for more than seven months after symptoms begin.
Immunologist Lavanya Visvabharathy of Chicago’s Northwestern Medicine Long-Covid Clinic, who was still suffering from chronic fatigue, headaches and insomnia four months after being infected, recently got rid of her fatigue symptoms “100 percent” two weeks later. to take Paxlovid. But, to prove this effect, careful and controlled studies are needed, emphasized the doctor. The head of the Long Covid Clinic, Igor Koralnik, referred to the long list of widely used drugs that interact with Paxlovid. The pill, therefore, cannot be taken that way. “Paxlovid is not a harmless drug,” he said.
Paxlovid, which combines a new Pfizer pill with the existing drug ritonavir, is currently approved in high-risk patients for use in the early days of Covid infection to prevent serious illness. Pfizer announced in the US that the company had no ongoing Covid studies. The company also did not say whether any would be considered.