More recently, the research arm of Epic, the electronic health record company headquartered in Verona, Wisconsin, shared results showing large differences in hospitalizations and deaths between those treated with Paxlovid and those who hadn’t been treated with Paxlovid among people who had been vaccinated. The differences were larger among those 65 and older. But the Epic research also showed a difference in the 50-64 age group.
For example, there 27 hospitalizations (0.13%) and zero deaths among 20,407 peoplein that age who were treated with Paxlovid and who had been fully vaccinated and had had a booster. Among the 38,689 adults in the fully vaccinated, boosted group who were not treated with Paxlovid there were 143 hospitalizations (0.37%) and seven deaths (.02%). That works out to a hospitalization rate that is almost three times higher among those not treated with Paxlovid compared with those that were.
Jacqueline Gerhart, vice president of informatics at Epic, noted that research findings from Israel had suggested that Paxlovid didn’t make a difference in the 50-64 age group. But that was a smaller study than the one conducted by her and her colleagues that might not have the statistical power to detect a difference. The size of Epic’s database, called Cosmos, is an advantage.
“On first look at these numbers, we not only saw a difference, but it was statistically significant, meaning that the confidence intervals didn't overlap, meaning that we could be very confident that there actually benefit to taking Paxlovid between age 50 and 64” Gerhart said in an interview with Managed Healthcare Executive.®
