In the two years since she caught the coronavirus, 38-year-old Jessica McGovern has cycled through “well over 100 drugs, supplements, and therapies” to try to keep her long-COVID symptoms at bay.
In almost all cases, she told me, the interventions were to no avail: Exhaustion, weakness, and aches still lashed her to the couch.
Then, around the start of April, she began a five-day course of Paxlovid, Pfizer’s antiviral pill. By her second day on the drug, McGovern “could feel the messaging in my body shifting.”
Four weeks later, her fatigue, aches, and labored breathing remain. But the screaming, nerves-on-fire pain that gripped her body for two dozen months “is basically gone,” she told me.
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To date, no established treatments exist for long COVID. But in recent weeks, a smattering of long-haulers—McGovern among them—have been surprised to feel their sicknesses subside after taking Pfizer’s new drug.
The case for treating long COVID with antivirals is far from open-and-shut. But should these anecdotal reports augur a flood of similar data, Paxlovid might offer a surprisingly straightforward fix to one of the pandemic’s biggest puzzles.
