US to pay Pfizer nearly $2 billion for more Paxlovid courses in 2023

The US government agreed to pay Pfizer nearly $2 billion for an additional 3.7 million courses of its COVID-19 anti-viral treatment Paxlovid, the company said yesterday.

The new purchase supplements the 20 million courses previously bought by the US, and are planned for delivery by early 2023, Pfizer said in a statement.

The Biden administration had previously agreed to pay around $10.6 billion – roughly $530 per treatment course – for the first 20 million courses it ordered.

They are paying around the same amount per course under the new contract.

The drugmaker said last year that it could produce up to 120 million courses of Paxlovid this year.

As of 30th November, Pfizer had shipped almost 37 million courses of Paxlovid to 52 countries around the world, it said in a statement.

The two-drug oral treatment is currently available for free in the US, where more than nine million courses have been delivered to pharmacies and patients have used over six million courses of the treatment, according to government data.

In Pfizer’s clinical trial, Paxlovid was shown to reduce hospitalisations and deaths by around 90 per cent for unvaccinated people at risk for serious disease.

In another trial, Pfizer was not able to show the treatment was effective in those considered at standard risk, including vaccinated patients.

Edits by EP News Bureau