Top U.S. health officials are concerned about the rise of new Covid variants that appear to evade treatments used to protect immunocompromised people from severe illness
Top Biden health officials are increasingly concerned about the rise of new Covid variants in the U.S. that appear to evade existing treatments used to protect immunocompromised people from severe illness, according to three senior administration officials.
The rapid growth of the variants puts them on track to become the dominant strains of Covid within the next month, officials said. While the vaccines and the administration’s main Covid treatment, Paxlovid, still work against those strains, the development could leave hundreds of thousands of people with compromised immune systems vulnerable to a winter wave without the two therapies that they’ve come to rely upon.
Both BQ1 and BQ1.1 are sub variants of BA.5, which has long been the dominant Omicron strain in the U.S. The majority of cases in the country are still BA.5, CDC data shows. The strains are still likely to be more contagious than previous versions of the virus, raising the odds of a surge of cases and hospitalizations during a winter season when people are more apt to gather indoors and spread the virus.“We were trying to determine what the doubling time is. It should start to have an influence on how dominant it is going to be as we get into the late fall and early winter,” Fauci said, referring specifically to the BQ 1.1 variant.
That’s left the administration’s more substantial pandemic preparedness efforts at a standstill. Health officials currently estimate it will take four to six months to develop updated treatments for the immunocompromised that would work against the new strains. The variants’ spread is also likely to ratchet up the urgency of the administration’s existing vaccination campaign, which has so far gotten off to a slow start. The U.K. has already experienced a rebound of cases and hospitalizations driven by the existing BA.5 strain. Even though cases in the U.S. remain low, officials have noted signs of an uptick in the Northeast, typically the first region hit by a surge.