24 Friday March 18 2022 | the times
News
The medical regulator has approved a
new Covid antibody treatment that
could help to protect thousands of
people for whom vaccines do not work.
The drug, called Evusheld, can be
used like a vaccine to prevent infec-
tions.
Developed by the British drugmaker
AstraZeneca, it has been designed to
protect people whose immune systems
do not respond to conventional Covid
jabs. It is already being used in the
United States, France and Spain, and
medical charities have urged the UK
government to follow suit.
New Covid antibody drug approved by regulator
Rhys Blakely Science Correspondent However, Britain is yet to confirm if it
will purchase the drug. In a deal struck
last year, the US paid around $500
(£379) a dose.
A spokesman for the Department of
Health and Social Care said: “We will
continue to closely monitor investiga-
tions into the treatment’s effectiveness
against new variants.”
There are an estimated 500,000 im-
munocompromised people in the UK,
including around 50,000 who have pro-
duced no antibodies against the coro-
navirus after vaccination.
This group includes people with
blood cancers and others receiving
chemotherapy, as well as organ trans-
plant patients and people taking medi-
cines for multiple sclerosis and rheu-
matoid arthritis.
Vaccines work by prompting a func-
tioning immune system into producing
antibodies and infection-fighting cells
against the coronavirus. By contrast,
Evusheld contains two types of ready-
made laboratory-produced antibodies.
It is administered in two injections.
Trials suggested that it cut the risk of
symptomatic Covid by 77 per cent, with
protection lasting for at least six
months after a single dose, the Medici-
nes and Healthcare products Regulato-
ry Agency (MHRA) said. However, the
agency added that the trials had not in-cluded the dominant Omicron variant.
Medical charities welcomed the
MHRA approval but also voiced frus-
tration with the government. Gemma
Peters, chief executive of Blood Cancer
UK, said that high infection rates
meant that many immunocompro-
mised people “have felt left behind as
the rest of society gets back to normal”.
Evusheld offers them hope of getting
a similar level of protection against
Covid as most of the population have
already got from the vaccines, she
added. “But the government is yet to set
out how it plans to use Evusheld. For
some time, we have been urging the
government to set out its approach to
using preventative treatments for
people who have not responded well to
the vaccines, and it is disappointing that
it has not yet done so.
“We hope the MHRA’s approval of
Evusheld will prompt a sense of gov-
ernment urgency on this that has so far
been lacking. Many people with blood
cancer have spent two years avoiding
social interaction — the government
needs to do more to support them to be
able to start getting back to normal.”
Dr Penny Ward, visiting professor in
pharmaceutical medicine at King’s Col-
lege London, said: “This treatment
could therefore be a good way to pro-
tect patients who are not able to re-
spond normally to vaccination and al-
low this group to be able to return to a
more normal life than they are cur-
rently able to enjoy. Many of these folks
are continuing to shield while Covid is
still circulating and this agent could
help them feel more confident to return
to a more normal life.”
Dr June Raine, the MHRA chief ex-
ecutive, said: “We know that some
people may not respond adequately to
these vaccines and for a small number
of individuals Covid-19 vaccines may
not be recommended for other reasons,
such as a previous allergic reaction to
one of the vaccine ingredients. For
these people, Evusheld could provide
effective protection against Covid-19.”The national picture
How many people have Covid-19?
There were 89,717 new cases reported
yesterday, bringing the cumulative total to
20,001,627 or 299.4 for every 1,000 people
43.9% increase from seven days ago
(based on seven-day moving average)How many are in hospital?
There are 14,078 patients in hospital being
treated. 281 patients are on ventilators. An
additional 1,777 patients have been
admitted, up 21.9 per cent in seven days to
March 13 when this data was last updatedDaily casesHospital admissions
Seven-
day
averageOct Jan
2021Apr Jul Oct Jan
202205001,0001,5002,000
Seven-
day
averageDeathsHow does this year compare
with last year?
There were 11,225 deaths from all causes
recorded in England and Wales in the week
to March 4, of which the coronavirus
accounted for 6 per cent. The number of
weekly deaths was 19 higher than the
five-year average for the same time of yearHow many have died?
Yesterday there were 138 deaths reported,
bringing the total number of deaths in the
past seven days to 74 0. The rolling average
number of daily deaths is 105.7, up from
103.7 a day a week agoOct Jan
2021Apr Jul Oct Jan
2022050,000100,000150,000200,000Oct Jan
2021Apr Jul Oct Jan
202201,0002,0003,0004,0005,000National
R number
Seven-dayaverage 0.8 to 1.1Pandemic four times more
miserable than a Monday
Tom Whipple Science EditorFrom excess mortality to GDP contrac-
tion, there are many ways of under-
standing the effect of the pandemic.
Now scientists have given us another:
in terms of happiness, the pandemic
was four times as bad as a Monday
morning.
An analysis of the language used on
social media has found that globally,
the arrival of the coronavirus caused a
lot of unhappiness. While few would be
surprised that a killer pandemic
brought the mood down, the research
was able to quantify it — showing that
the drop was several times that which
greets the end of each weekend, and
greater than that caused by a medium-
sized hurricane.
The study, published in the journal
Nature Human Behaviour, used “senti-
ment analysis” automatically to scan
the contents of 600 million social
media posts from 10.5 million people,
and assess the emotional content. This
produced a standardised score of how
happy or unhappy a population was.
“The takeaway here is that the pan-
demic itself caused a huge emotional
toll, four to five times the variation in
sentiment observed in a normal week,”
Professor Siqi Zheng, from the Massa-
chusetts Institute of Technology, said.
Because the posts all had a location,
the researchers could see how changes
in happiness differed between coun-tries. Britain experienced one of the
largest drops in happiness in Europe,
beaten only by Spain.
In general they found that in coun-
tries with a higher death toll and less
efficient governments, people were
more unhappy and took longer to
recover. But most places suffered.
Across the world, the magnitude of the
drop was greater even than that seen in
natural disasters.
The idea of the analysis — which
began before the pandemic — is to pro-
duce a way of gaining knowledge about
happiness automatically. Although
some countries conducted their own
dedicated happiness surveys, with find-
ings that mirrored those in the latest
research, most did not.
The researchers used the data, which
included people from 100 countries, to
model the effects of lockdown by com-
paring similar countries that did and
did not impose restrictions. They said
they were surprised by the findings. At
least in the short term, there was tenta-
tive evidence that going into lockdown
led to a small net increase in happiness.
Zheng said that the effect was not
universal, however — and this made
sense. “On the one hand, lockdown
policies might make people feel secure,
and not as scared. On the other hand, in
a lockdown when you cannot have
social activities, it’s another emotional
stress. The impact of lockdown policies
perhaps runs in two directions.”