The White House: Pfizer's anti-Covid drug prevents hospitalization or death from the disease

A senior White House official announced that Pfizer's anti-Covid-19 drug "Baxilvid" helps to avoid hospitalizations and deaths amid the current surge of epidemic infections in the United States.

Demand for the treatment has surged fourfold over the past month and is now being administered around 20,000 prescriptions per day, Ashish Jaa, the White House coordinator for the COVID-19 outbreak response, said at a press conference.

"I think that this is a very important reason why we did not notice a significant increase in deaths despite the large increase in injuries (...) When you look at the intensive care departments, we see that the level of patients entering these units is much lower than expected," he said.

And "Paxlovid", a combination of two drugs taken orally for five days, led in clinical trials to reduce the proportion of people requiring hospitalization and deaths among groups most at risk of developing severe forms of the disease, by approximately 90%.

Ashish Jaa called on Congress to quickly allocate $22.5 billion for the government to secure the next batch of COVID-19 vaccines that may be anti-several variants of the virus.

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