I doubt that. Consider no one was vaccinated and 1% of humans would need medication because of a "serious" case. Then the medicine would need to be 100x more expensive than the vaccine considering the alternative is everyone was vaccinated. Now consider many people got 3 or even 4 shots. It's 300x-400x now.
Also you can give the medicine to already vaccinated people that also have serious cases. So you still can sell it in a lower capacity. Also you can sell both vaccines and medicine to states in large batches which is great.
It's a big golden goose for the pharma industry.. let's never forget that.
The vast majority of people isn't going to get a specific, probably expensive medicine for what amounts to a cold for most people. I certainly won't. If anything they'll take some aspirin/paracetamol and rock on.
My guess would be to expand the current vaccine initiatives to include this medicine. Have the sniffles? Stop by CVS and get dosed. I can envision a cost model where this approach works out better for them over time.
No, because it's priced so that the expected cost of untreated illness is still going to be higher. Hospitalization is very very expensive! Also, they will probably be bought in bulk by the government and negotiated down by insurance companies to less than a thousand dollars per treatment,
But doesn't it still rely on a person getting early symptoms of COVID-19 seeking medical aid? I can't really imagine someone developing a cough and then immediately heading to their physician to get their antiviral pills.
... Wait, can you not? That's basically how tamiflu works. And one relic of the pandemic will be that at-home covid testing will be cheap, easy and available in a way that at-home flu testing is not (antigen tests are already cheap and easily available in Europe, and soon will be worldwide).
Now, I can imagine that not _all_ cases will be given the antiviral automatically. If you're a vaccinated 18 year old with no comorbidities, say, that is probably not going to be cost-effective (though, well, we'll see what happens with long covid); the chances of you landing in hospital are just very low. But if you're an overweight unvaccinated 60 year old, there's quite a good chance of you turning into a hideously expensive ICU case, and it probably makes sense to provide the treatment.
It doesn't have to a prescription, they could distribute them after a telehealth meeting, or on the same basis as vaccines, or at any pharmacy after a talk with the pharmacian, etc...
Fortunately we can trust that they aren't using any of those billions they have made to manipulate public opinion on the issue, because that would be immoral and therefore off limits.
> Then the medicine would need to be 100x [300x-400x] more expensive than the vaccine
I'm not suggesting this is true, but it would need to be 100x-400x more profitable, and that includes cost to make and store as well as the price is charged.
Maybe making mRNA vaccines costs much more than a simpler molecule like Paxlovid [0], and hospitals generally seem to charge much more than the over the counter price for everything. You've seen horror stories about $25 aspirin [1] which is easily 400x more expensive than the penny per pill cost of 500 tablets in a $5 bottle [2].
This is what i meant (profitable). Sorry bad translation. However their vaccine research was highly funded by states (at least here in Germany and I suspect everywhere else too) so.. not sure how easy it would be to calculate all of that.
That's another subtlety. They've already been funded to make the mRNA vaccine, so maybe that has been milked dry and it's time to move on to the next profitable cow. Obviously I'm just speculating that it's possible.
Also you can give the medicine to already vaccinated people that also have serious cases. So you still can sell it in a lower capacity. Also you can sell both vaccines and medicine to states in large batches which is great.
It's a big golden goose for the pharma industry.. let's never forget that.