"Paxlovid mouth" is real

In Pfizer’s clinical trials, about 5.6 percent of patients reported an “altered sense of taste,” called dysgeusia in the medical literature. A Pfizer spokesperson assured me that “most events were mild” and “very few patients discontinued study as a result”; the outer packaging of the drug doesn’t mention it at all, and the patient fact sheet breezes past it. But Paxlovid-takers told me it’s absolutely dysgeusting.

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The bad taste may come on shortly after people take their first set of pills. (If prescribed Paxlovid, you’re supposed to take three pills, twice daily, for five days.) For a 36-year-old dog walker in Washington, D.C., named sangam ‘alopeke (who styles their name without capital letters), the effect emerged within about an hour of the first dose. Lindsay Wright, a 40-year-old creative director in Winnipeg, Canada, said she noticed it after 90 minutes. Sheila Borkar, a 30-year-old transportation engineer who also lives in Washington, took a pill before bed and woke up to the taste.

“I imagine this is what grapefruit juice mixed with soap would taste like,” Anna Valdez, a nursing professor in Sonoma Valley, California, told me. (We communicated over Twitter direct messages because Valdez had lost her voice from COVID.) “It is horrible and does not go away.”

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