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Health officials are trying to understand why some COVID patients who were treated with Pzifer's antiviral drug Paxlovid are getting sick for a second time. There have been several reports about people completing the five-day course of the medication only to get sick again a few weeks later.
Erin Blakeney told CNN that she and her husband contracted COVID-19 after attending a large memorial service in March. They are both fully vaccinated and boosted and even wore N95 masks as a precaution. When they started having symptoms, they contacted their doctor and were prescribed Paxlovid.
Blakeney said that they had mild symptoms and that after the five-day course of medication was completed, they felt fine. But, a few weeks later, they both started feeling sick and took a rapid COVID test. To their surprise, they both tested positive.
"We both took rapid tests, and we were both very positive again, and we were like, 'Oh, my gosh, what just happened? We've never heard of this,'" Blakeney said.
Doctors are trying to figure out why some people are contracting the virus again, despite taking the antiviral treatment and being fully vaccinated. The drug has only been authorized for a few months, and health officials are monitoring the situation to determine if the reported cases are just a few outliers or a sign of a larger issue.
"It is a priority," Clifford Lane, deputy director for clinical research at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told Bloomberg, adding that it is "a pretty urgent thing for us to get a handle on."
Pfizer said it continues to collect real-world data about the drug and pushed back against the idea that the treatment is not effective.
"Although it is too early to determine the cause, this suggests the observed increase in viral load is unlikely to be related to Paxlovid," Pfizer spokesman Kit Longley told the Washington Post in an email. "We have not seen any resistance to Paxlovid and remain very confident in its clinical effectiveness."