Doctors and pharmacists can now prescribe COVID-19 drugs Paxlovid and Lagevrio to patients without a positive test of infection, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) said Wednesday.
Pfizer’s Paxlovid and Merck’s Lagevrio were granted emergency-use authorizations by the FDA in December 2021. Both oral pills have since been used as postinfection treatments for patients experiencing mild-to-moderate COVID symptoms.
In the revised authorizations, the FDA wrote that health professionals may “no longer require positive results of direct SARS-CoV-2 viral testing” before providing patients with the two drugs. Instead, the authorizations now require that adults and kids 12 years of age and older have a “current diagnosis of mild-to-moderate COVID-19.”…