Which countries are buying anti Covid pills?
The United States has an agreement with Pfizer for 10 million treatments, the United Kingdom has already started to administer them and Italy is also interested in buying anti Covid pills. All the details
The anti Covid pills leave the laboratories to be added to the drugs already on the market against the pandemic. The treatment, designed to introduce errors into the virus's genetic code, can be taken at home without the need for close medical surveillance.
Merck and Pfizer are the pharmaceutical companies that are currently placing their products. So here are the countries that are already starting to grab them.
UNITED STATES
US President Joe Biden, after unveiling a billion-dollar plan to expand vaccine manufacturing capacity, also announced an agreement with Pfizer to purchase 10 million treatments of its Paxlovid antiviral pill.
Biden also assured that the treatments will be "easily accessible and free" . The United States, which ordered 1.7 million doses this year, spent $ 1.2 billion, or about $ 700 per treatment.
UK
The UK is the first country in the world to have authorized the use of the drug and by the end of the month it is expected to receive nearly half a million doses of the Merck pill, molnupiravir. Following a clinical study in the US he showed that a cycle of five days halved the risk of hospitalization or death for patients at risk, last month – wrote the Guardian – Downing Street announced a deal to buy 480,000 doses.
ITALY
While the EMA announced that it had started the continuous rolling review procedure for the Merck pill last week, CTS coordinator Franco Locatelli said that "Aifa has already taken steps to acquire an adequate amount of the drug. oral antiviral for Covid-19 molnupiravir ".
Today, reports Agi , the extraordinary commissioner Francesco Paolo Figliuolo was mandated by the Ministry of Health to acquire “a quantity equal to 50,000 treatment cycles of oral antiviral drugs for Covid-19 for each type of Molnupiravir and Paxlovid. For which the procedures for the stipulation of contracts and / or purchase will be started in order to allow their effective availability as soon as the companies will be able to supply them ".
FRANCE
On November 6, France24 wrote that the era of anti Covid pills had also begun in France. Already at the end of October, in fact, the Minister of Health Olivier Veran had said that France had "positioned itself very early in the pre-order", agreeing with Merck for 50,000 doses that it will receive between the end of November and the beginning of December. .
GERMANY
The German weekly Wirtschaftswoche , quoted by Reuters , reports that the interim Minister of Health Jens Spahn intends to buy the Pfizer pill: "The Ministry of Health – writes the newspaper – is in contact with Pfizer for a possible purchase of the antiviral drug. Paxlovid ".
EXTRA UE
The company Airfinity, specialized in market analysis, reveals that among the countries interested in the anti Covid pills are New Zealand, Australia and South Korea, to which, according to Reuters , Taiwan, Singapore and Malaysia would also be added.
REDUCE COSTS
To significantly lower prices, however, generic drug companies need to start producing anti Covid pills. According to Harvard University, in this case, the Merck pill could cost 17 euros per treatment.
Pfizer, as Start wrote a few days ago, announced that it will allow generic drug manufacturers to supply its antiviral pill to 95 low- and medium-low-income countries through a licensing agreement with Medicines Patent Pool (MPP), the non-profit organization supported by the United Nations for access to medicines in poor countries.
The agreement, however, excludes many countries hard hit by the pandemic and which do not yet have equal access to vaccines, including Cuba, Jamaica, Thailand, Iraq, Libya. Furthermore, a country like Brazil, again according to the agreement, will be able to produce the generic but only to export it.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/sanita/quali-paesi-stanno-acquistando-le-pillole-anti-covid/ on Fri, 19 Nov 2021 13:24:44 +0000.