UK gives approval for drug treatment that can tackle new variant

A drug said by developers to work against the Omicron coronavirus variant has been approved by the UK’s medicine regulator.

The Xevudy (sotrovimab) treatment has been found to cut hospital admissions and death by 79 per cent in those deemed most vulnerable to the disease.

Omicron mutations did not escape drug activity in tests by drug company Vir, which has joined up with GlaxoSmithKline to produce the treatment.

“Sotrovimab was deliberately designed with a mutating virus in mind,” said Vir chief executive George Scangos.

A senior scientist in South Africa, where Omicron was first identified, said on Thursday that the country was reporting an increase in patients being reinfected with Omicron in a way that it did not experience with previous variants.

“Previous infection used to protect against Delta. But with Omicron that doesn’t seem to be the case,” Prof Anne von Gottberg said.

She said scientists believed symptoms were less severe for those reinfected or infected after vaccination.

“So we believe, I think very much so, that the reinfections [of the] … disease will be less severe,” she said.

The UK government has ordered about 100,000 doses of sotrovimab, which is administered intravenously over a period of 30 minutes.

The authorities approved the drug for people with mild to moderate coronavirus who are at high risk of developing severe disease.

Nine new cases of the Omicron strain were reported on Wednesday in England, bringing the UK total to 32.

Australia became the first country to approve sotrovimab in August, months before the Omicron variant was detected.

Moderna says it is working on booster vaccines aimed at tackling Omicron and expects them to be ready by March. The company’s chief has given a warning that the variant could evade the vaccines currently on the market.

UK ministers are taking advice on whether children aged 5 to 11 should be given Covid-19 vaccines, the government said.

“The data at the moment suggests that young children are much less vulnerable but, as and when that data changes, we are guided by the science and we stand ready,” said UK Science Minister George Freeman.

He said it was an “urgent priority” to administer booster vaccinations to the population over the coming weeks. Prime Minister Boris Johnson this week announced the extension of the booster vaccine campaign to cover all over-18s. He said every adult in England would be offered a third dose of a vaccine by the end of January.

Meanwhile, France’s leading scientific adviser said Omicron could become the most common coronavirus strain in the country by the end of January.

Jean-Francois Delfraissy said the “true enemy” was still the Delta variant, which is spreading in a fifth wave across much of Europe.

“We should see a progressive rise of the Omicron variant, which will take over from Delta”, possibly by the end of January, he said.

Researchers believe they may have found a link between the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine and blood clots. Many countries suspended the use of the UK-made drug after people suffered from side effects.

A study by scientists in the UK and US found the interaction between the vaccine and a protein, known as platelet factor 4, could be behind the cases.

Researchers believe the interaction may cause a chain reaction in the immune system that is known as vaccineinduced immune thrombotic thrombocytopenia.