More Than 100,000 Oral Antiviral Treatments Set to Expire in Australia

The Australian Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) approved Paxlovid, manufactured by Pfizer Australia Pty Ltd. for CCP virus oral treatment back in January 2022. The previous government subsequently ordered over a million doses.

However, in the past 6 months, approximately more than 100,000 doses will have expired. This means that only a small percentage of medications were prescribed to patients.

In light of this, a few weeks ago, the government urged doctors to expand the range of people eligible for the oral antiviral treatment to include people over 70 years of age, those with risk factors for serious illness, and Aboriginal people.

Although the prescription tripled since then, a large number of the medications are still on the shelves and less than 20,000 doses have been prescribed, a large amount of which will go to waste.

The reason for this waste is partly due to the fact that almost 90% of Australians have received at least one dose of CCP virus vaccine and people are starting to realize that the vaccine is not effective in protecting people from the CCP virus, leading to loss of trust in the antiviral drug and the health care system and therefore they stop buying the drugs. In addition, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) issued a bulletin in May this year warning of the possibility of CCP virus rebound after taking Paxlovid treatment.

On the other hand, more people are choosing to take alternative medicines such as Ivermectin or artemisinin to treat CCP virus.

While taxpayer’s money is being wasted on expired drugs, pharmaceutical companies are making a fortune. Pfizer’s Paxlovid drug sales in the second quarter far exceeded expectations, reaching $8.1 billion, beating Wall Street’s expectations by $1 billion.

Pfizer attributed the rise in drug sales to demand driven by a surge in infections, but the reality is that governments are footing the bill with taxpayer money, regardless the actual demand.

It is not only the oral doses of Paxlovid that are about to expire but hundreds of millions of doses of vaccines have expired and gone to waste worldwide. Since January, nearly 1.5 million doses of vaccine have expired in Canada and 55 million doses in European Union.

CDC said on June 7 that 82.1 million doses of vaccines, which is 11 percent of the total, have been discarded in the past 18 months, and about one million doses of vaccines expired last month in Nigeria.

With the backing of governments, it is no wonder that Pfizer has kept its overall sales forecast of $98 billion to $102 billion unchanged, despite a significant drop in the willingness of populations in all countries to receive the vaccines.