No Alex ' Pfizer' Berenson this paper doesn't show that Paxlovid works

Does anyone actually read?

Paxlovid works, the vaccines don't

The paper that AB is taking about; ‘Oral Nirmatrelvir and Ritonavir in Non-hospitalized Vaccinated Patients with Covid-19’ in Clinical Infectious Dieseaes magazine is an accepted paper but is in some sort of pre print mode.

It is NOT a randomised placebo controlled trial. The non-treatment group cannot be called a control group as there are so many confounding factors. Nor is the placebo effect accounted for, which can be responsible for up to 50% of a drug effect.

The authors selected vaccinated, non-hospitalised people with ‘covid’ positive tests using a search engine. They choose equal sized groups of those who took oral Nirmatrelvir and Ritonavir (NMV-r) and those who didn’t.

The demographics of each group, who had self selected, or been selected by circumstance whether to take NMV-r or not, were markedly different. The NMVr- group was older, predominantly White, implying better access to health care and many were already on medications for CVD. The non-NMV-r group had twice as many African Americans. The so called ‘propensity matching’ of health risk does not take socio-economic factors into account.

The outcomes measure all cause, not necessarily ‘covid’ related ER visits, hospitalisation and death within 30 days of a treatment or from positive test result in the non-NMV-r group.

The researchers found a 7% difference in all-cause, not necessarily ‘covid’ related, outcomes in the NMV-r group, who had better access to health care.

There are many reasons why these demographically different and self or circumstance selected groups will have different all-cause outcomes.

This is not placebo controlled trial and therefore scientifically invalid.

The study ends at 30 days. It is impossible to determine positive or negative effects of a drug from this study.

Jo

https://academic.oup.com/cid/advance-article/doi/10.1093/cid/ciac673/6672670?login=false.