Last year, I wrote about the inability of Canadians to get Paxlovid, the life saving covid drug, due to political limitations as opposed to technical. A miracle drug that could save lives during a pandemic was going through the same slow approval process that every other drug goes through, which then needed to be prescribed by a doctor and received, all within the first few days of the illness.
The good news is that now that pharmacists have the ability in Ontario to prescribe Paxlovid, and as you might imagine once its easier to get, consumption has skyrocketed:
Three weeks after the Ontario government gave pharmacists the green light to prescribe Paxlovid as a treatment for COVID-19, prescriptions for the potentially life-saving antiviral drug have more than doubled.
[..]
Provincial data shared with CBC Toronto shows 4,342 courses were dispensed in the week after the policy was announced by Health Minister Sylvia Jones on Dec. 8 — double the previous week and the highest weekly number since the drug became available, according to the minister's office.
This is obviously good news in a year where more people have died of covid than in 2020 or 2021 in Canada. What continues to irk me is that this decision wasn’t made until December 12, meaning its been a year since anyone in government did anything to try and break down the barriers to access. That’s one year where people died instead of getting the treatment. I wonder how many people Paxlovid could have saved if this had happened a year ago.
The article makes it clear that Paxlovid isn’t right for everyone, which is surely the case, but my issue has always been that the barriers between the right people and Paxlovid were going to be tough for most people to overcome. In a pandemic when we have something that can help, government should have responded in order to overcome some of those barriers. I’m glad some of these barriers have been removed, although I wonder about some of the risks of relying on pharmacists for an increasing amount of things.
Looking back at my analysis last year, the one big thing that I missed was that a significant portion of Canadians have no family doctors and no timely access to medical care, myself and my family included. About 1/5 Canadians are looking for a doctor, with many of them waiting over a year (its been about five years for me, but that’s what I get I guess for living in a city where the hospitals are “among the worst in the western world”). Since last year though, access to medical care in hospitals has gotten incredibly worse, where right now someone has been waiting over 9 hours to see a doctor at a hospital in Ottawa1. Canadian health care is a complex problem with no obvious answer, which is why our governments do not seem capable of solving it.
This is actually a big improvement, in the last week or two this number has been over 20 hours.