Flutterby™! : Paxlovid doesn't slow hospitalizations for vaccinated people

In the Pipeline by Derek Lowe: Paxlovid: You'd Have Expected More

The other way to interpret this is that the vaccinations themselves have done enough to help keep people out of the hospital that Paxlovid treatment can't do much more. I think it's very likely that if there had been a Paxlovid trial early on with a median age of 70 among unvaccinated adults (instead of the real median age of 42) that it would have shown much more than that 5.5% improvement in hospitalization risk! But vaccinating these patients makes any benefit of Paxlovid drop back into the statistical noise. So to me, these data are disappointing for Paxlovid, but likely reinforce the benefits of the vaccines.