Long COVID Treatment: Will Pfizer’s Paxlovid Finally Solve Today’s Global Pandemic?

Until now, no established treatments are available for long COVID but in recent weeks, a handful of long-haulers have been shocked to feel their illnesses diminish after they took Paxlovid, a new drug by Pfizer.

As indicated in a report from The Atlantic specified that early anecdotes about the effects of Paxlovid on long COVID are intriguing although no one has tested them in clinical trials yet. This same report also said that the case for treating long COVID with antivirals "is far from open-and-shut."

Nonetheless, should these anecdotal reports predict a flood of similar data, Paxlovid might provide a surprising straightforward fix to one of the biggest puzzles of this pandemic.

Long COVID is quite ranging, very diverse, and capable of wreaking havoc on numerous tissues that treatment, for many people, will undoubtedly necessitate the rehabilitation of a lot of bodily systems at once.

Quest for Long COVID Treatments Hampered

The quest for long COVID treatments has been impeded partly by the nature of long COVID. Certain conditions like cancer for one, seem to be not just one disease but a classification of related yet distinct syndromes, each of which could manifest with its own set of symptoms, necessitate its own therapeutics, and stem from a barely different cause.

In some percentage of long-haulers, maybe most of them, the virus is believed to have "come and gone," leaving behind physiological wreckage including raging inflammation, battered tissues, self-attacking antibodies, discombobulated nerves, freckling of blood clots. In these circumstances, experts said, Paxlovid might not be effective.

However, probably, the drug could help another group of long-haulers, who are believed to have harbored hard-to-reach reservoirs of virus that rile the body up regularly.

A lot of scientists, which include Akiko Iwasaki, from Yale, one of the world's top researchers of long COVID, contend that strong clues are there. Specifically, SARS-CoV-2 definitely can stick around for months in some people's bodies and can mosey out as well, of the airway to colonize other tissues which include ones that some immune fighters are not able to access.

Investigating New Long COVID Treatments

Essentially, scientists have observed traces of the genetic material and proteins of the virus in a "melange of organs," sometimes months following the onset of infections.

However, while such fragments could describe active viruses, they could be bits of stray microbial trash, as well.

Pfizer does not appear actively disliked. The firm is considering how researchers would potentially study it, explained the spokesperson for Pfizer, Kit Longley, although the company representative declined to clarify the reason Pfizer has no study underway.

The National Institutes of Health, whose initiative called "RECOVER," has an over $1 billion to study long COVID, recently sought proposals for clinical trials of new treatments for long COVID, which include, possibly, antivirals, a promising step.

Considering Paxlovid

The health agency has been strongly blamed for dillydallying in the year-plus since the launch of the program, and for de-emphasizing trials that are focused on treatments.

There's no guarantee as well, that Paxlovid, which is detailed in a Drugs.com report, will be one of the treatments tested.

When asked to elaborate on the drug's experimental state, the NIH said only that the health agency is very much interested in long-term viral activity as a probable cause of PASC long COVID. More so, antivirals like Paxlovid for one, are in the class of therapeutics being considered for clinical tests.

Related information about Paxlovid is shown on CNBC Television's YouTube video below:

Check out more news and information on COVID-19 in Science Times.