The Food and Drug Administration on Wednesday authorized the first pill for COVID-19, clearing for emergency use an antiviral treatments from Pfizer at a precarious moment in the two-year-old pandemic.
Called Paxlovid, Pfizer’s drug represents a valuable new tool for treating people with COVID-19, especially as the fast-spreading omicron variant appears to evade protection from past infections, most antibody medicines and, at least partially so, vaccines. Cases in the U.S. are rising quickly and places like New York City are reporting record numbers of new infections.
