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Return to: Covid Treatments
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#Post#: 3299--------------------------------------------------
A Pill to Prevent COVID-19 Shows Promise
By: jlayman Date: March 15, 2025, 11:48 am
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https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/pill-prevent-covid-19-shows-160816795.html
[ ... ]
That’s the potential promise of a new study on a drug made
by Japanese pharmaceutical company Shionogi. At a scientific
conference in San Francisco, researchers reported that their
drug, ensitrelvir, helped prevent people who were exposed to
SARS-CoV-2 from testing positive for the disease.
There is currently no drug approved to prevent COVID-19, but
ensitrelvir is already approved in Japan as a treatment for
COVID-19. It reduces hospitalizations for COVID-19 among people
at the highest risk of complications; for the less vulnerable,
it cuts down on the number of days they're sick with symptoms.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is considering the drug
for fast-track approval as a way to prevent COVID-19, based on
this latest study presented at the Conference of Retroviruses
and Opportunistic Infections. (The study has not yet been
published in a peer-reviewed journal.)
Researchers studied more than 2,300 people age 12 and older who
didn't have COVID-19 but lived with someone who had tested
positive at the time of the study. They were then randomly
assigned to receive either ensitrelvir or placebo pills for five
days. Everyone in the study began taking their pills once a day
within three days of when their housemate first reported
symptoms of COVID-19.
Among those who took ensitrelvir, about 3% ended up developing
COVID-19, compared to 9% of those taking placebo. It turned out
that about 10% of the household members of the person who
initially tested positive also were positive, even if they
didn't experience symptoms and didn't realize they were
positive—which highlights how transmissible the virus can
be, and how important it is to protect people from getting the
infection. The results mean that the drug lowered the risk of
getting COVID-19 by 67%.
The idea of using an antiviral treatment to protect people at
high risk of infection isn’t new. The popular flu
treatment oseltamivir, or Tamiflu, is around 84% effective at
protecting people from getting the flu when someone else in
their house has it. But when scientists studied antiviral
treatments for COVID-19, such as Paxlovid and molnupiravir, they
didn’t find the same preventative benefits.
“This study is the first where this strategy [to prevent
COVID-19] was documented to succeed,” says Dr. Frederick
Hayden, professor emeritus of medicine at University of Virginia
School of Medicine, who presented the data at the conference.
Finding a way to prevent COVID-19 is critical, especially for
older adults, immunocompromised people, and others who are at
high risk of developing complications. In the study, people in
this category who were taking the drug reduced their risk of
getting COVID-19 by 76%. Avoiding infection also allows people
to sidestep complications such as Long COVID, for which there
aren't yet many treatments.
Because ensitrelvir works by blocking the virus’ ability
to make more copies of itself, it makes sense that it can both
treat and prevent disease, depending on when people take it. The
dose for treating COVID-19 is the same as the dose used in the
study to prevent disease. If people take ensitrelvir
early—within three days of being closely exposed to
someone with the virus—then the drug can effectively
hamper SARS-CoV-2 enough to prevent it from infecting too many
cells. If people take it after they have been infected, the drug
can help to reduce the amount of virus the immune system has to
manage and can lower the chances of severe disease.
“This is really, to my knowledge, the first documentation
that one could use an oral antiviral for the prevention of
COVID-19 in higher risk transmission settings like
households,” says Hayden.
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