Sibylla Bostoniensis: Getting Paxlovid in Massachusetts

Siderea at Sibylla Bostoniensis today published a useful guide to getting prescribed paxlovid in Massachusetts, should you have the misfortune to find yourself testing positive for COVID-19.

De Re Paxolvidia Bostoniensis

Siderea, the mystery animating Sibylla Bostoniensis, has written a very useful guide to getting paxolovid if you’re in Mass and test positive. ^[1]

Some of the high points:

• Stock up in advance on home test kits, the most easily obtainable being rapid antigen kits.
  • They’re free, quick, painless, and accurate.
  • Practice using a test kit if you haven’t done so before, and use it when you have any symptoms at all.
• Figure out how to get prescribed paxlovid, and transportation to get it.
  • Consider the Test to Treat locator, which will find the nearest place for you to go to get tested, evaluated, and prescribed if appropriate.
  • CVS will do something similar with eVisits.
  • Any Urgent Care facility will handle your situation, too.
  • Lots of PCPs aren’t up to speed on the qualifying conditions for paxlovid, and will refuse to prescribe. However, the conditions are quite broad (e.g., mild overweight). So print that out, circle the bits that apply to you, and hand it to your PCP saying firmly that you qualify by the CDC guidelines for paxlovid.
• Some medical conditions or other prescriptions rule out paxlovid.
  • For example: a family member had to get antibody infusions instead, because of a blood thinner associated with a medical implant. Paxlovid would have made the blood thinner too potent (risk of hemmorrhage) and the blood thinner couldn’t have been withdrawn for 5 days (risk of throwing a clot).
  • So you may have to insist on an alternative. Bebtelovimab is one of the few remaining infusions that are potent against Omicron.

The Weekend Conclusion

This is potentially life-saving information for Mass folk. Bookmark it.

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Notes & References

1: Siderea, “Massachusetts: What you need to know about Test-to-Treat [COVID]”, Sibylla Bostoniensis, 2022-May-21. ↩