The Biden administration announced new plans to promote COVID-19 antiviral therapies by enlisting more pharmacies and federally resourced test-to-treat sites.
The once-scarce Pfizer antiviral, marketed under the name Paxlovid, is now widely available, senior administration officials told reporters Monday. The federal government will continue to scale up the distribution of the 20 million courses of treatment it purchased from Pfizer, pledging nearly to double the number of places antivirals are available in the coming weeks.
The administration had been criticized for failing to have the pills widely available before the omicron wave hit and killed hundreds of thousands.
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“Now that we have ample supply of these treatments, we can make it easier for pharmacies to order from the federal government,” an administration official said.
Currently, the pills are available at about 20,000 locations — including pharmacies, community health centers, hospitals, urgent care centers, Veterans Affairs clinics, and Department of Defense medical treatment facilities — across the country.
Starting this week, the administration will allow thousands of its pharmacy partners to order free antiviral treatments directly from the government. The administration said it expects that oral antivirals will become available in more than 30,000 locations in the coming weeks.
The administration will also scale up its test-to-treat initiative, a plan President Joe Biden announced during his State of the Union address that will outfit pharmacies and clinical settings to be a one-stop shop for COVID-19 testing and antivirals.
The promise of the test-to-treat site is that within minutes of testing positive in a CVS Minute Clinic or similar clinical setting, the customer can be prescribed the antiviral pills, which are highly effective when taken within the first five days of symptom onset.
There is another antiviral on the market, called mulnupiravir, from Merck, but its efficacy at preventing hospitalization pales in comparison to Paxlovid’s.
The Biden administration will also continue to educate doctors able to prescribe the antivirals about their availability. Supplies of the antivirals have been scarce until recently, and many doctors would not prescribe the pills simply because they believed slim supplies should be reserved for those at the highest risk of negative outcomes. Some doctors also did not know where their patients would be able to pick up the pills.
Today, @CDCgov issued a health advisory about the availability and use of treatments for mild to moderate #COVID19 illness for those at increased risk for severe outcomes.
Vaccination remains the best way to prevent severe COVID-19 outcomes.
More: https://t.co/nWEq27risu
— Rochelle Walensky, MD, MPH (@CDCDirector) April 25, 2022
“[The administration is] making sure that all over the country in every community, providers know that we’ve got Paxlovid available for their patients, any of them who are at high risk of progression to severe COVID-19. We really want them to know that full range of the existing eligibility,” a senior administration official said.
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Supplies of the treatment courses are plentiful at the moment, but administration officials said they were concerned about a lack of additional funding approved by Congress that could be used to purchase additional pills or monoclonal antibody treatments. While the government can cover the cost of 20 million treatment courses of Paxlovid, whether it will be able to afford more courses of this treatment or future treatments remains in question.
“We have sufficient funding to secure these treatments,” an administration official said. “And what I think we’re really worried about going forward are future treatments, and so we need funding from Congress to secure the essential needs for treatments going forward.”
