More than a billion dollars worth of Pfizer’s Covid-19 antiviral drugs procured in Europe have been wasted, according to health data, as tight controls over who can receive the medication left millions of doses unused before their expiry date.
Paxlovid — designed to be given to patients shortly after they test positive for the virus — has been far easier to obtain in the US than in Europe, where access has often been restricted to the elderly or people at high risk of developing severe Covid.
But data from analytics group Airfinity shows European countries including the UK, France, Spain and Italy could have made the medication more accessible without using up supplies, as more than 1.5mn five-day courses of the pill worth about $1.1bn have expired despite their usage dates being extended by six to 12 months.