The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) reported Friday that the XBB.1.5 variant of the coronavirus is likely to be resistant to the anti-COVID-19 drug ‘Evusheld’ from the British laboratory AstraZeneca.
According to the FDA, the UK pharmaceutical company’s antiviral may not provide protection against the development of COVID-19 for those individuals who receive it and are subsequently exposed to the new variant.
Evusheld was the last antibody in its class still authorized in the United States to prevent infections in high-risk individuals, as all other drugs had been discarded due to the high likelihood that they would not protect against new variants.
Antibody therapies have been essential to treat and prevent disease in some seven million immunocompromised Americans for whom vaccines and antivirals may be less effective, according to Bloomberg.
However, as the COVID-19 virus has mutated, it has taken antibodies off the market one by one.
Currently, XBB.1.5 — which comes from Omicron — represents 28 percent of the total number of variants circulating in the United States, according to FDA data.
The director general of the World Health Organization (WHO), Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, has detailed that the international health agency is assessing the rapid increase of the XBB.1.5 variant, both in the United States and in 24 other countries.
Tedros said he was «really concerned» about the current epidemiological picture of COVID-19, «both because of the intense transmission in various parts of the world and because of a recombinant subvariant that is spreading rapidly».
In this regard, he assured that WHO «is closely monitoring and assessing the risk of this subvariant and will report accordingly» on the new data obtained.
Source: (EUROPA PRESS)
