Clinicians are ‘skittish’ about the Covid antiviral, resulting in a failure to treat patients who could greatly benefit
Even before the US president tested positive for Covid-19, Dr David Smith – an infectious disease consultant at the University of California, San Diego – said he was getting calls daily from other physicians seeking advice on whether to prescribe Paxlovid, an antiviral drug, to patients with coronavirus.
The calls come from “doctors who haven’t educated themselves on how to use the drug, and so they are a little skittish about it”, Smith said. “If I had a magic wand out there … one of the things that I would want to do is to get more people comfortable with the medication.”