the health authorities restrict the use of Xevudy, ineffective against the BA.2 sub-variant

Orange with Media Services, published on Saturday, April 30, 2022 at 09:07

In France, as the Haute Autorité de Santé (HAS) reminds us, only two other drugs remain approved against Covid-19, including the current version of Omicron: AstraZeneca’s Evusheld.

Ineffective against the now extremely dominant BA.2 sub-variant in France, Xevudy, a treatment against Covid-19, was restricted by French health authorities Friday, April 29. The High Authority for Health (HAS) “maintains the early access authorization of this product only for patients affected by a strain other than the BA.2 subline of the Omicron variant”, she summarizes in a press release. .

This amounts, in fact, to exclude almost any prescription Xevudy, a synthetic antibody developed by the British GSK, because BA.2 now represents the overwhelming majority of coronavirus contaminations.

In France there is a “virtually exclusive circulation of the BA.2 sub-lineage”, noted the French public health agency on Friday in its weekly update.

Administered intravenously, Xevudy, which is intended for people recently infected with the coronavirus and at risk of a serious form, had however revealed one of the only treatments to maintain its effectiveness against the Omicron variant when it arrived at the end of 2021. But, since then, the previous dominant version of Omicron, BA.1, has been supplanted by BA.2, against which this treatment is therefore much less effective.

In France, as the HAS reminds us, only two other drugs remain approved against Covid-19, including the current version of Omicron: l’Evusheld d’AstraZeneca, given preventively to people at risk who cannot benefit from a vaccine, and Paxlovid, the pill from the Pfizer laboratory. This is aimed at the same public as Xevudy – people at risk and who have just been infected – but remains little given by doctors, particularly in the face of a complex prescription procedure. However, the HAS recently issued an opinion which could make it possible to simplify this.

The decline continues in France

According to figures released Friday by health authorities, the virus continues its decline in France. In all, 52,919 new positive cases for the Omicron variant were recorded in 24 hours, compared to 59,760 cases on Thursday. The seven-day average, which is more statistically significant, has fallen, to 61,628 daily contaminations against 84,516 a week earlier. It exceeded 130,000 in early April.

The number of patients hospitalized with Covid-19 is also down to 23.579 against 24,130 the day before, according to data from Public Health France. They were 24,883 a week ago. Within the hospital, critical care is also affected by this drop: there were 1,591 Covid-19 patients on Friday, against 1,629 Thursday, and 1,645 seven days ago. The epidemic has again caused the death of 158 people in 24 hours, bringing the total number of deaths in France to 145,869 in more than two years.

Vaccination has changed little: 54.3 million people received at least one injection (i.e. 80.6% of the total population) and 53.4 million now have a full vaccination schedule (or 79.2% of the total population), according to figures from the Ministry of Health.

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