Five-year Anniversary of the COVID Pandemic

It’s been five years since the WHO declared COVID-19 a pandemic. Since then nearly 20 million have died worldwide.

We’ve learned important lessons that I hope will influence our responses to outbreaks in the future. The U.S. has three vaccines — none are perfect, but they are safe and effective at preventing serious disease.

Scientific collaboration drove the development of vaccinations and treatments. At the same time, public health measures sparked large pockets of resistance, particularly when recommendations encroached on personal choice. For example, masks are highly effective at reducing the spread of infection, but many rejected them not based on science but on beliefs around personal freedoms.

Telemedicine expanded access to health care and helped prevent the spread of illness. But, the pandemic reduced our social connections, and mental health suffered. Through it all, people demonstrated their resilience and adaptability to entirely new circumstances.

We also learned that we cannot trust some political leaders and celebrities to make medical recommendations. Remember when we were told that ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine were effective treatments? Experts knew that neither drug had any impact on the disease. A new study published in the journal Health Affairs has shown that poorer individuals, those in rural areas, and people living in the South US were far more likely to take these drugs.

Future preparedness requires better coordination, healthcare infrastructure, communication, and transparency.

Due to conflicts of interest, pharmaceutical companies must be separated from drug evaluation. We need rules about pricing and transparency that limit backroom deals between drug manufacturers and governments. Moderna’s vaccine, which costs about $3 to produce and benefited from substantial federal subsidies, raised the selling price from $26 to $130 just to boost profits. It worked; the company made tens of billions of dollars from those sales.

We’ve also just learned new information about Paxlovid, the one approved treatment we have. The drug received emergency approval based on early studies showing it reduced COVID-19 hospitalization in unvaccinated middle-aged adults. But the drug was heavily prescribed to vaccinated older people with early symptoms. Dr. John Mafi, a professor of medicine and health services at UCLA, and his team, just published a large study in JAMA examining Paxlovid’s effectiveness in older individuals — the people most likely to take the drug. He told me what he found:

“It does not significantly reduce COVID-19 hospitalizations or mortality among vaccinated older adults.”

According to Dr. Mafi, there is reason to believe that Pfizer, which makes Paxlovid, knew this data when it reported the results to get the drug’s approval in 2022. The company greatly exaggerated the benefits, perhaps to increase sales of the drug that costs $1600 per prescription.

To sum up, five years later, there’s still a lot we don’t know. Many questions remain, such as COVID-19’s origins and the causes of long-term COVID. But, future disease outbreaks are inevitable. We need more, not less, funding from the federal government to monitor infectious diseases and prevent the next outbreak.

– Dr. Michael Wilkes with a Second Opinion