by Megan Redshaw, Childrens Health Defense:

Pfizer is developing a direct-to-consumer platform to sell some of its drugs online, including Paxlovid and a migraine nasal spray, the Financial Times reported.

The move is the latest by Big Pharma to bypass primary care physicians and traditional pharmacies to sell drugs. It follows Eli Lilly’s launch in January of LillyDirect, which provides home delivery of diabetes, obesity and migraine medications.

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Pfizer’s website will connect patients in the U.S. with independent telehealth consultants who can prescribe medications, and an online pharmacy partner will fill and ship prescriptions. The drugmaker plans to have the website up before the end of the year.

Pfizer will sell Paxlovid, Lucira, a COVID-19 and flu test, and the drugmaker’s recently approved nasal spray Zavzpret and other migraine medications on the site.

Last year, Pfizer launched a collaboration with Ada Health, a digital health symptom-checker company, that offers a platform for people to self-diagnose their symptoms by inputting them into Ada’s artificial intelligence (AI) app. The app also connects users with physicians to prescribe medications and allows them to track their symptoms over time.

With funding from Pfizer, Ada created a self-assessment tool for people to identify if they are at high risk of developing severe COVID-19. If they are, it connects them with a healthcare provider within two hours and facilitates same-day prescription pick-up at a local pharmacy.

In that case, the provider and pharmacy were both referred to third-party sites. The new platform would pull all of these things together, Pfizer told the Financial Times.

Telehealth services have sprung up over the past few years for weight-loss drugs, psychiatric medications and other issues like hair loss, erectile dysfunction and skin care.

“Drugmakers have kept in their lane, though, developing and manufacturing medicines without getting into the business of connecting patients to physicians and delivering products to their homes,” according to Fierce Pharma, until this year.

When Lilly launched its platform earlier this year, the American College of Physicians raised concerns about the move.

“The American College of Physicians (ACP) is concerned by the development of websites that enable patients to order prescription medications directly from the drugmaker,” Dr. Omar T. Atiq, the organization’s president, said.

“While information on in-person care is available, this direct-to-consumer approach is primarily oriented around the use of telehealth services to prescribe a drugmaker’s products,” he added.

The organization advocated for an established and valid physician relationship for telemedicine to take place responsibly.

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