UK moves on to next big Covid issue

Britain’s Vaccine Task Force was the country’s biggest triumph since the 2012 Olympics — and it was a lot more consequential. It gave the UK, which has one of the world’s highest pandemic death tolls, early access to a suite of effective vaccines and a jumpstart on immunising the population. It saved countless lives.
Can the government replicate that success to find a drug that can treat Covid-19 at home?
That, at least, is the plan. A new antivirus task force is being set up to find two drugs that can treat Covid-19 at home before the end of the year, and establish a further pipeline of drugs for next year. It’s one part of
the government’s three-pronged approach for tackling a potential third wave of infections, alongside readying booster shots to fight against new variants and continued mass testing.
There are good arguments for pushing ahead with therapeutics. Even with the country’s vaccine drive, some community transmission of the virus will still happen. A small number of people will likely get the virus after being vaccinated, while others won’t be vaccinated either because of hesitancy or a medical reason. Younger people are a bit less likely to get the vaccine but just as likely to get Long Covid, which can leave debilitating symptoms for long after the virus has left the system.
Finding a pill that will “stop Covid-19 in its tracks,” as Boris Johnson put it, would prove cost-effective — in terms of quality of life years and other measures — says Dalia Dawoud, a senior scientific advisor with the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence who recently co-authored a study on the economic impact of antivirals.
And yet, as she and others note, this is a totally different ballgame from vaccine procurement. The options are more limited by what drugs already exist, and there is still a need for longer-term investment in therapeutics.
The biomedical challenge of developing antiviral drugs is very different from that of finding vaccines. Viruses aren’t easily druggable because they colonise human cells, have a high rate of replication and are mutable — the ultimate moving target. Out of 220 viruses known to infect humans, antiviral drug development is currently present for only 10 of these pathogens.
The new UK task force will largely be choosing from repurposed existing drugs and a few in late-stage trials to find candidates. “It’s somewhat easier said than done, because there aren’t many of the solutions available today,” says John Bamforth, director of the Eshelman Institute for Innovation at the University of North Carolina and interim executive director of the Rapidly Emerging Antiviral Drug Development Initiative, a public-private partnership focused on identifying antiviral candidates to use in future pandemics.

—Bloomberg