So far, all of the drugs developed against COVID-19 have been disastrous in one way or another. Remdesivir, for example, which to this day is the primary COVID drug approved for use in U.S. hospitals,1 routinely causes severe organ damage2,3,4,5 and, often, death.
Another notable one is Paxlovid, which was granted emergency use authorization to treat mild to moderate COVID-19 in December 2021.6 While not showing signs of being deadly like remdesivir, Paxlovid has become so widely associated with rebound infection that the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has even issued a warning about it. According to the CDC’s health advisory:7
“Recent case reports document that some patients with normal immune response who have completed a 5-day course of Paxlovid for laboratory-confirmed infection and have recovered can experience recurrent illness 2 to 8 days later, including patients who have been vaccinated and/or boosted.” The CDC8 and Pfizer9 have suggested that sometimes COVID-19 naturally comes back after a person tests negative, implying that COVID-19 rebound is spontaneous and not necessarily linked to Paxlovid. However, research10 by Dr. Michael Charness of the Veterans Administration Medical Center in Boston refutes this notion.