Study: COVID already mutating around Paxlovid | Eastern NC Now

The preprint study by virology researchers at Austria's Medical University of Innsbruck, which has not been peer-reviewed, went online two days before the FDA expanded the EUA for Paxlovid, though the drug was associated with COVID rebounds even before Fauci's bout.

Citing the FDA's initial authorization of Paxlovid, the researchers searched for "resistant mutants" against the drug's protease inhibitor, nirmatrelvir. 

To avoid the perils and regulatory burdens of gain-of-function experiments, they engineered a "chimeric" virus with COVID's main protease and then "applied selective pressure" with nirmatrelvir to induce mutations. The researchers confirmed the effect of the mutants by reintroducing the protease and testing with a cellular assay.

While they identified several mutations in the protease that "confer resistance" to nirmatrelvir, they also discovered that "mutations predicted by our method already exist in SARS-CoV-2 sequence depositions" in databases maintained by the U.S. National Library of Medicine and GISAID global genomic initiative.

https://justthenews.com/government/federal-agencies/study-finds-covid-already-mutating-around-paxlovid-fda-circumvents