The French health authorities this Friday restricted the use of an anti-Covid-19 treatment, Xevudy, noting its lack of effectiveness against the BA.2 sub-variant. A shelving that virtually excludes any use against a now extremely dominant version of the virus.
No more Xevudy prescriptions
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 excluding almost any prescription of Xevudy, a synthetic antibody developed by the British GSK, because BA.2 now represents the overwhelming majority of coronavirus contaminations.
The ubiquitous BA.2
There is in France an “almost 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 severe form, had nevertheless proved to be one of the only treatments to remain effective 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: AstraZeneca’s Evusheld, given preventively to people at risk who cannot benefit from a vaccine, and Paxlovid, the pill from the Pfizer laboratory.