The government has agreed to buy a Covid-19 drug that early trials show can stop many infected people going to hospital.
The drug, molnupiravir, still needs to be approved by Medsafe before it can be used, which may not be for a few months.
It treats mild to moderate Covid-19, and trial results show hospitalisations halved for people who have health problems such as obesity, diabetes or heart disease.
Pharmac chief executive Sarah Fitt told Morning Report it's likely to be one of a few drugs eventually used to treat Covid-19.
"Hopefully, we won't need them. vaccination is still the best method of controlling Covid, but we also want to have some other medicines in our toolkit if we do need them."
She said one of the challenges could be getting the drug to somebody in time, as it is most effective in mild or moderate cases of Covid-19.
"That's something that we'll need to work through, how we would target people at that early stage of the disease.
"It may well be you might have household contacts, somebody in the house has it and you might be able to use it in other people in the household."
New Zealand has put 60,000 courses of the drug on order, which Kitt said is more than Pharmac initially wanted.
"We started off at 30,000, but we actually upped it to 60,000, and that was the most we could get for now," Fitt said.
"It may well be that into next year we'll be able to get more, but the rush really last week was to be able to secure this initial allocation.
"It's early days with the data yet and obviously we'll be watching that very carefully, and if it looks promising then we can obviously look to order more next year."
Fitt said 60,000 was, as a proportion, similar to the amount of the drug purchased by Singapore and Australia.
She hopes Medsafe will approve the drug early next year.
