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       #Post#: 3299--------------------------------------------------
       A Pill to Prevent COVID-19 Shows Promise
       By: jlayman Date: March 15, 2025, 11:48 am
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  HTML https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/pill-prevent-covid-19-shows-160816795.html
       [ ... ]
       That’s the potential promise of a new study on a drug made
       by Japanese pharmaceutical company Shionogi. At a scientific
       conference in San Francisco, researchers reported that their
       drug, ensitrelvir, helped prevent people who were exposed to
       SARS-CoV-2 from testing positive for the disease.
       There is currently no drug approved to prevent COVID-19, but
       ensitrelvir is already approved in Japan as a treatment for
       COVID-19. It reduces hospitalizations for COVID-19 among people
       at the highest risk of complications; for the less vulnerable,
       it cuts down on the number of days they're sick with symptoms.
       The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is considering the drug
       for fast-track approval as a way to prevent COVID-19, based on
       this latest study presented at the Conference of Retroviruses
       and Opportunistic Infections. (The study has not yet been
       published in a peer-reviewed journal.)
       Researchers studied more than 2,300 people age 12 and older who
       didn't have COVID-19 but lived with someone who had tested
       positive at the time of the study. They were then randomly
       assigned to receive either ensitrelvir or placebo pills for five
       days. Everyone in the study began taking their pills once a day
       within three days of when their housemate first reported
       symptoms of COVID-19.
       Among those who took ensitrelvir, about 3% ended up developing
       COVID-19, compared to 9% of those taking placebo. It turned out
       that about 10% of the household members of the person who
       initially tested positive also were positive, even if they
       didn't experience symptoms and didn't realize they were
       positive—which highlights how transmissible the virus can
       be, and how important it is to protect people from getting the
       infection. The results mean that the drug lowered the risk of
       getting COVID-19 by 67%.
       The idea of using an antiviral treatment to protect people at
       high risk of infection isn’t new. The popular flu
       treatment oseltamivir, or Tamiflu, is around 84% effective at
       protecting people from getting the flu when someone else in
       their house has it. But when scientists studied antiviral
       treatments for COVID-19, such as Paxlovid and molnupiravir, they
       didn’t find the same preventative benefits.
       “This study is the first where this strategy [to prevent
       COVID-19] was documented to succeed,” says Dr. Frederick
       Hayden, professor emeritus of medicine at University of Virginia
       School of Medicine, who presented the data at the conference.
       Finding a way to prevent COVID-19 is critical, especially for
       older adults, immunocompromised people, and others who are at
       high risk of developing complications. In the study, people in
       this category who were taking the drug reduced their risk of
       getting COVID-19 by 76%. Avoiding infection also allows people
       to sidestep complications such as Long COVID, for which there
       aren't yet many treatments.
       Because ensitrelvir works by blocking the virus’ ability
       to make more copies of itself, it makes sense that it can both
       treat and prevent disease, depending on when people take it. The
       dose for treating COVID-19 is the same as the dose used in the
       study to prevent disease. If people take ensitrelvir
       early—within three days of being closely exposed to
       someone with the virus—then the drug can effectively
       hamper SARS-CoV-2 enough to prevent it from infecting too many
       cells. If people take it after they have been infected, the drug
       can help to reduce the amount of virus the immune system has to
       manage and can lower the chances of severe disease.
       “This is really, to my knowledge, the first documentation
       that one could use an oral antiviral for the prevention of
       COVID-19 in higher risk transmission settings like
       households,” says Hayden.
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