4. Question No. 4—HealthDr LIZ CRAIG (Labour) to the Minister of HealthQuestion No. 4—Health4. Dr LIZ CRAIG (Labour) to the Minister of Health: What medicines does New Zealand now have available to treat those with COVID-19?Hon ANDREW LITTLE (Minister of Health): The Government recently secured access to two new pharmaceutical drugs for treating COVID-19—Ronapreve and baricitinib. Baricitinib is the fifth drug Pharmac has secured and sits alongside remdesivir tocilizumab molnupiravir and Ronapreve as treatments doctors can turn to to help people with a range of COVID-19 symptoms. The addition of new drugs to the suite of COVID19 medicines is good news for patients and for the health system as they help to reduce the severity of symptoms cut time in hospital and reduce the likelihood of death. All of these treatments are in addition to vaccination which of course remains the best protection against COVID-19.Dr Liz Craig: How can these be used to treat COVID-19?Hon ANDREW LITTLE: Some of these newly secured pharmaceutical treatments can help save lives and cut time in hospital like tocilizumab baricitinib can be used to help patients who are very sick. Ronapreve is a monoclonal antibody drug and there is a lot of excitement about it—Hon Member: Yes!Hon ANDREW LITTLE: —including in this House. The clinical advice is that it is a massive advance because it reduces the severity of COVID-19 and decreases the risk of patients passing the virus on to other people. Again these treatments are in addition to the best defence against COVID-19 which is getting vaccinated.Dr Liz Craig: When will these new treatments be available to the public?Hon ANDREW LITTLE: Therapeutic treatments will only become available to the public once Medsafe has completed their approval process. Tocilizumab and remdesivir are approved by Medsafe for use in New Zealand for other purposes than COVID-19 but currently Medsafe is considering their approval process for those drugs for COVID-19. Molnupiravir Ronapreve and baricitinib are yet to be approved. All are currently undergoing the Medsafe approval process. However it is important that we continue pursuing purchases ahead of the approval process to ensure availability as soon as possible something that I know the Opposition has been concerned about in relation to other treatments. For example Pharmac expects to receive 500 doses of baricitinib this month which is important because there's a global shortage of tocilizumab and this gives clinicians another option. We've also secured 60000 courses of molnupiravir as well as enough doses of Ronapreve to be able to treat 5300 people and we expect to be able to buy more next year.Chris Bishop: Has New Zealand signed an advance purchase agreement for Pfizer's new antiviral pill called PAXLOVID which early studies show is 89 percent effective in reducing risk of hospitalisation or death from COVID-19 and if not why not?Hon ANDREW LITTLE: I'm not aware that an advance purchase agreement has been signed at this point but I'm very confident that Pharmac as our drug procurement agency has been out in world markets making sure that we get the best opportunities that we can to make sure we have a good suite of drugs in our COVID-19 armoury and they're doing a very good job.