11 Jul Former BUPA boss says stocking up on Covid drug is key but that we must learn to live with Covid
A LEADING medical expert says it would be a sensible step for the UK to stock up on the AstraZeneca drug Evusheld.
Dr Andrew Vallance-Owen, former Medical Director and Chief Medical Officer of the Bupa Group, also said he believed the majority of healthcare workers don’t want to see a return to lockdown or quarantine measures despite a rise in the number of positive cases.
On stockpiling the preventive antibody Evusheld, Dr Vallance-Owen told GB News: “I think it would be a sensible move to stock up. I think the important thing to note though, is that it only will apply to a very, very small number of people. It is only to be given to people who are immunosuppressed, whose immune system is not working normally or people who have severe reactions to the vaccination. So it’s of very limited use. But for those people who have not been able to have the cover of vaccination, it’s going to be really important. So for them, it will be important to stock up but it’s a brand new drug. It was only announced in March. So it’s sort of early days yet.”
His comments come after campaigners in the UK say that we must stock up on AstraZeneca’s COVID drug amid a sharp rise in hospital admissions. Evusheld allows those who are normally less likely to get an immune response from COVID vaccines to return to a normal life.
Asked if there has been any recent data regarding the sharp rise in hospital admissions and how many of those figures are those who haven’t been vaccinated, Dr Vallance-Owen added: “We don’t have a lot of data on it. As the number of vaccinated people getting COVID goes up, the number of admissions will go up. It’s a very small percentage, again, of people these days., “The recent variants of the Omicron variant and the latest one, are much less severe, but much more infectious which is why we’re seeing many more cases. And the number of cases that are put out officially is probably much much lower than the actual number because there’s so little testing going on now.”
“So I think that the hospitalisations are the numbers you would expect. And they are not at the moment overwhelming the National Health Service but they’ve gone up some 27% in the last week or so. So it will be having an impact on hospitals and probably start to prevent medics from doing other important work which is like catching up on the waiting list.”
Dr Andrew Vallance-Owen believes we as a society need to learn to live with COVID as opposed to returning to lockdown measures.
He explained: “I certainly don’t think and I don’t think generally that health professionals feel that we need to go back to quarantine, to track and trace, to testing centres and all that sort of thing. But I do think you need to be careful there is now a lot of COVID around, I understand at the moment about one in 21 people in the UK have COVID as we sit here now. There were 285,000 people who picked it up on one day last week.
“So if you’re in a crowded space, like the underground if you’re in London or parties and things, you really should wear a mask to protect yourself. I think that’s as far as we go. We have to learn to live with it. It’s more like a flu-like illness now, we have to live with flu. And I think we have to live with COVID. Unless a variant comes across which is much more severe again, but that is not the case at the moment.”
