Washington: Iceland on Friday said it would tighten its Covid rules as it battles a rise in new cases, including capping gatherings and mandating masks in crowded areas.
The new measures were announced after the World Health Organisation said on Thursday that Europe was facing an alarming surge in cases, warning another 500,000 could die by February.
Iceland has recorded 179 new infections in the past 24 hours, a record since the start of the pandemic, according to health authorities. Meanwhile, Pfizer said earlier on Friday, that a clinical trial of its pill to treat Covid-19 had shown it is highly effective.
Pfizer’s is the second anti-Covid pill after that of Merck, which is actually an influenza medicine rebranded to fight the coronavirus. Pfizer’s has been created specifically to fight Covid. The Pfizer drug called Paxlovid achieved an 89 percent reduction in risk of hospitalization or death among adult patients with Covid who are at high risk of progressing to severe illness, the US company said.
The results from the middle-to-late stage clinical trial were so strong that Pfizer will stop recruiting new people for the trial, the company said. It will submit the data to the Food and Drug Administration as soon as possible as part of its “rolling submission” for Emergency Use Authorisation.
“Today’s news is a real game-changer in the global efforts to halt the devastation of this pandemic,” said Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla.
“These data suggest that our oral antiviral candidate, if approved or authorized by regulatory authorities, has the potential to save patients’ lives, reduce the severity of Covid-19 infections, and eliminate up to nine out of 10 hospitalizations,” he added.
The main analysis of the data looked at numbers from 1,219 adults in North and South America, Europe, Africa and Asia. Several companies are working on so-called oral antivirals, which would mimic what the drug Tamiflu does for influenza and prevent the disease from progressing to severe.
Pfizer started developing its drug in March 2020. Britain on Thursday became the first country to approve an anti-Covid pill, as it greenlit the use of Merck’s antiviral drug called molnupiravir to treat patients suffering from mild to moderate coronavirus.
Pfizer’s product is known as a “protease inhibitor” and has been shown in lab testing to jam up the virus’ replication machinery. If it works in real life, it will likely only be effective at the early stages of infection.
By the time Covid progresses to severe disease, the virus has largely stopped replicating and patients suffer from an overactive immune response. A simple pill to treat the coronavirus has been sought since the start of the pandemic.
Until now, Covid therapeutics such as monoclonal antibodies and Gilead’s remdesivir – authorized for use in the EU under the name Veklury -- have been administered intravenously.
Molnupiravir was initially developed as an inhibitor of influenza and respiratory syncytial virus – two other important acute respiratory infections – by a team at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia.
Britain, which has been one of the countries hardest hit by the pandemic, announced on October 20 that it had ordered 480,000 doses of molnupiravir.Meantime, a prominent French infectious disease doctor on Friday faced a disciplinary hearing for his controversial recommendations on Covid-19 that won him global fame at the height of the pandemic.
Didier Raoult championed the anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine as a coronavirus treatment at a time when the method was also being touted without evidence by former US Donald Trump and his Brazilian counterpart Jair Bolsonaro.
But while seen as a folk hero by some in the southern French city of Marseille, which prides itself on its independence from Parisian orthodoxy, he was also accused by peers of spreading false information about the benefits of the drug.
Studies have found that hydroxychloroquine does not work against the coronavirus. Raoult, 69, was present as the hearing presided over by the order of doctors in the southwestern Nouvelle-Aquitaine region got underway at a courthouse in the city of Bordeaux.
He gave no comment on arrival, acknowledging some thirty demonstrators who had come to support and applaud him. “Raoult, our beacon in the night”, “Don’t touch our Raoult” were among the slogans banners testifying to the popularity of a doctor who prides himself on confronting establishment orthodoxy. He stands accused of several breaches of the medical code of ethics related to the promotion of hydroxychloroquine against Covid-19 as non-validated treatment.
The disciplinary chamber, chaired by a magistrate, can decide on sanctions against the doctor ranging from a simple warning to a temporary suspension. It must deliver its ruling between 15 days and eight weeks after the hearing.
A familiar figure on French TV with his shoulder-length blond hair and grey beard, Raoult was also visited for advice by French President Emmanuel Macron in April 2020 as the pandemic was in full swing in a meeting that stunned many observers.
Raoult and his Marseille infectious diseases institute are also facing accusations at of carrying out allegedly illegal “clinical trials” against tuberculosis since 2017, claims which they deny. Raoult must leave his job at the end of June at the latest due to retirement rules.