COVID still lurks around the edges: Paxlovid sales up

COVID-19 continues to smolder around the edges of the benefits market, like hot ashes flickering around a poorly tended campfire.

Executives from Pfizer, a pharmaceutical maker, said during a conference call they held to go over earnings for the third quarter with securities analysts that sales of Paxlovid, a treatment for COVID, were strong.

The number of U.S. patients treated with Paxlovid  fell to 4.9 million during the first quarter quarters of the year, from 5.2 million during the comparable period in 2023, according to Pfizer data.

But a COVID wave that hit in the summer led to better-than-expected growth in commercial Paxlovid sales, Dr. Albert Bourla, the company’s chief executive officer, said

The average number of patients treated with Paxlovid increased to 225,000 per week in mid-August, from about 100,000 per week in early July.

The Paxlovid COVID treatment business and the Cominarty COVID vaccine business “are both entering into a category where we understand what the volumes are going to be,” Chris Boshoff, Pfizer’s chief oncology officer, said. “We believe these are going to be durable businesses going forward.”

Related: Yes, COVID does increase stroke risk, researchers find

One reason there is room for growth is that, today, only about 57% treated by physicians for COVID receive Paxlovid, Pfizer estimates.

Executives from a DaVita, a company that provides kidney dialysis services, reported that overall mortality from all causes continues to be noticeably higher than it was was before the COVID pandemic and continues to affect revenue.

For DaVita, the flow of new patients with severe kidney disease has been relatively steady, and one of the major causes of changes in revenue is patients’ death.

Dialysis patient has been elevated this year, and DaVita expects it to continue to be elevated in 2025, according to Joel Ackerman, the company’s chief financial officer.

“The fact is that the elevated mortality continues and hasn’t gone back to pre-COVID levels,” Ackerman said. “Every quarter that happens, it informs our views a bit.

At Shionogi, a Japanese pharmaceutical company, executives pointed out that COVID is still flaring in Japan.

In Japan, “people might think that COVID has ended, but the hospitalization rate is increasing and the number of deaths is increasing,” according to Isao Teshirogi, the company’s president.

One challenge is that only 13% of the people in Japan known to have COVID received an antiviral treatment, even though the number of deaths caused by COVID was 15% higher than the number of deaths caused by influenza, Teshirogi said.

Increasing the percentage of patients with COVID treated with antivirals to 70% or more will be important to preventing hospitalizations and deaths, Teshirogi said.