Skip to main content

Monoclonal Antibodies are Back

 At last, the state of Indiana put out a useful tweet:

People with weakened immune systems are at greater risk if diagnosed with #COVID19, but there are treatments that can help prevent serious illness. Learn more at http://tinyurl.com/C19treatment

The link goes to the state's page on COVID treatment, which includes the monoclonal antibody Sotrovimab. It's available, has emergency use authorization and effective against Omicron. 

The clinical trial participants were at high risk of COVID progression due to age, obesity, diabetes and other risk factors. This was a phase 3, multicenter, randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial.

From the study:

In this prespecified interim analysis, which included an intention-to-treat population of 583 patients (291 in the sotrovimab group and 292 in the placebo group), 3 patients (1%) in the sotrovimab group, as compared with 21 patients (7%) in the placebo group, had disease progression leading to hospitalization or death (relative risk reduction, 85%; 97.24% confidence interval, 44 to 96; P=0.002). In the placebo group, 5 patients were admitted to the intensive care unit, including 1 who died by day 29. Safety was assessed in 868 patients (430 in the sotrovimab group and 438 in the placebo group). Adverse events were reported by 17% of the patients in the sotrovimab group and 19% of those in the placebo group; serious adverse events were less common with sotrovimab than with placebo (in 2% and 6% of the patients, respectively).

Evusheld (tixagevimab and cilgavimab) is also available as prophylaxis for moderately to severely immunocompromised people.

Indiana's treatment website includes a map of treatment centers.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Blog Lineup Change

Bye-bye, Fathead. I've enjoyed the blog, but can't endorse the high-fat, high-carb Perfect Health Diet that somehow makes so much sense to some otherwise bright people. An astrophysicist makes some rookie mistakes on a LC diet, misdiagnoses them, makes up "glucose deficiency," and creates a diet that's been shown in intervention studies to increase small LDL, which can lead to heart disease. A computer programmer believes in the diet and doesn't seem eager to refute it because, perhaps, scientists are freakin' liars and while he's good at spotting logical inconsistencies, lacks some intermediate knowledge of human biology. To Tom's credit, he says it's not the right diet for everyone, but given the truckload of food that has to be prepared and eaten, impracticality of following it while traveling (or even not traveling), and unsuitability for FODMAPs sufferers, diabetics and anyone prone to heart disease (i.e., much of the population), I'm...

Carrageenan: A Sickening Thickener. Is it a Migraine Menace?

Let me tell you about my ride in an ambulance last night. I woke up at six o'clock from a nap with a mild headache. I ate dinner and took my vitamins, along with a couple of extra magnesium pills. Since magnesium helps my TMJ flare-ups, I thought it might help my headache. Then I went to see my mother. A few hours later, I had a severe headache, sinus pain and nausea. During a brief respite from the pain, I left for home, but less than a mile later, I got out of my car and threw up. A cop, Officer Fisher, pulled up behind me and asked if I was okay. He believed me when he said I hadn't been drinking, but he said I seemed lethargic and he wanted the paramedics to see me. (Later he mentioned that a man he'd recently stopped was having a stroke.) Thinking I had a migraine headache, the paramedics wanted to take me to the hospital. But since I knew that doctors don't know what causes migraine headaches, and I didn't know what effect their medicine would have on m...

1972: Carole King, M*A*S*H and...Food for 2014?

I feel well enough to try Atkins induction again. The palpitations are gone, even without taking potassium. My energy level is back to normal--no more trucking on the treadmill early in the morning  to burn off nervous energy or emergency meat, cheese and mineral water stops after yoga. It's back to lounging around to Chopin and Debussy in the morning and stopping at the wine bar for pleasure. I'm using the original Atkins book: Dr. Atkins' Diet Revolution from 1972. While looking in the book for a way to make gelatin (which is allowed on induction, but Jello(TM) and products like it have questionable ingredients), I felt the earth move under my feet : those recipes from 42 years ago look delicious and they're mostly real food. It makes sense, though: the cooks who wrote the recipes probably didn't have had a palette used to low-fat food full of added sugar or a bag of tricks to make low-fat food edible. Anyone who writes a recipe called "Cottage Cheese and...