After the UK medicines regulator yesterday approved Merck’s Covid pill for use on recently infected, vulnerable patients, Pfizer announced its own successful treatment, Paxlovid. Pfizer’s pill was shown to reduce the risk of hospitalisation and death in Covid patients by up to 89 per cent compared with a placebo.

The drug has proved so effective that enrolment in the trial has been stopped and Pfizer says it plans to apply to the US regulator for emergency use ‘as soon as possible’.