There are statins that can be taken with Paxlovid. The general recommendations are to either to stop taking them 12 hours before through a few days after treatment or switch temporarily to one of the statins that can be take with Paxlovid.

I agree that in an ideal world, drs would recommend your course of action. I am not debating that statins can be stopped and paxlovid taken, with statins resumed after the disease has run its course. that doesnt change the fact that doctors will still hesitate to prescribe paxlovid if their patient is on statins. This could be for a number of reasons - but consider for a second that up to 55% of seniors are already noncompliant in listening to their drs and taking their medication.

When you are asking a patient to stop taking a drug that they have habitually taken for potentially decades, and they have shown hesitancy or inability to comply in the past, maybe prescribing a drug with a potentially serious interaction isnt the best course of action.

Your argument has now went from: significant portion of the population aren't eligible, to: doctors might hesitate to prescribe it to old people because old people can't follow instructions.

We were talking about a hypothetical situation where someone is scared because they high risk.

The Doctor can A--tell that person to change their medication (they don't have to stop statins, not all statins can't be taken with Paxlovid) for 2 weeks and take Paxlovid.

Or B they can take Molnupiravir, which worst case doesn't do much, and best case is much less effective than Paxlovid. Also Molnupiravir has mutagenic effects (which granted probably aren't as much of a concern for someone 65+).

Molnupiravir was approved based on early data that showed it was much more effective than it has proven to be, and at a time when Paxlovid production hadn't ramped up yet. It very likely wouldn't be approved if it were being evaluated today.

Based on it's potential to produce more variants, and it's not widely studied mutagenic effects, keeping it around because some doctors might hesitate to prescribe Paxlovid to a subset of old people seems less than ideal.

No, my argument is still that a significant portion of the population is ineligible. The anecdote above is just to help you understand a large piece of that ineligibility. If you want to understand that ineligibility yourself, feel free to take the fda checklist and add the populations within each exclusion and see how many tens of millions of people that is: https://www.fda.gov/media/158165/download