In addition to Germany, more and more countries are treading water on the corona vaccination front.

Not even the vaccination donations in some of the poorer countries are welcome and are sent back, as the COVAX initiative recently complained and the International Monetary Fund had to report.

But at least as far as the supply of medicines is concerned, the health authorities should definitely make progress by autumn.

In focus: everyone who cannot - or does not want to - protect themselves adequately.

In other words, people for whom the vaccination has had a poor effect either due to illness or age, and those vulnerable who do not want to protect themselves.

In other words, all those who have not been vaccinated, those who are unwilling to be vaccinated and those who are tired of being vaccinated with a correspondingly high risk of disease.

Joachim Müller-Jung

Editor in the feuilleton, responsible for the "Nature and Science" department.

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According to a new “urgent recommendation” from the World Health Organization (WHO), all of them should be prescribed the Pfizer pill with the active ingredients nirmatrelvir and ritonavir, which has been marketed as “Paxlovid” since January.

Even if the test is positive and the people are only slightly ill.

As early as possible.

If the drug is taken every twelve hours for five days within the first five days after the first symptoms, it can prevent nine out of ten hospitalizations and deaths, according to a recent study in the New England Journal of Medicine.

According to the WHO group in the British Medical Journal, there were an average of 84 fewer hospital admissions per thousand patients taking Paxlovid.

The new, strong WHO recommendation for Paxlovid is just a change in the pharmaceutical strategy against Covid-19.

The basis is two current patient studies in which around 3100 Covid 19 positives were involved.

The responsible WHO expert group has also corrected itself in terms of remdesivir.

The antiviral drug, which had already been tested in large studies in the first year of the pandemic, failed after initial euphoria among the WHO experts, and the benefit of the drug administered by blood infusion at the bedside could not be clearly proven statistically.

Five more recent studies with a total of 2,700 patients have now shown that the drug can very well prevent severe and fatal courses if you only look at the most vulnerable Covid 19 patients.

Therefore, there is now at least a weak recommendation for this group.

Ideally, this infusion should also be administered when the infected person is not yet showing any severe symptoms.

In general, the following applies to antiviral drugs: The sooner they are used, the better the active ingredients usually inhibit virus replication.

In Germany, the clinic group involved in remdesivir studies pointed out early on that the drug does have its uses.

Demand for antivirals like Paxlovid could increase further in the coming months if anecdotal treatment reports from social media confirm that the Pfizer pill promises to alleviate certain long-Covid symptoms, such as fatigue syndrome.

However, there is no clinical evidence for this yet.

This idea is made plausible by the observation, which has been confirmed several times, that the Sars-CoV-2 viruses remain in certain tissues after infection - persist - and thus evade the immune and drug attacks until new propagation cycles.

This is also supported by some epidemiological findings, such as the fact that a high level of immunity, such as that achieved with vaccination boosters for many months, greatly reduces the incidence of long-Covid.