I am both perplexed and distressed by this report from CNBC:
Dr. Scott Gottlieb warned that vaccinating Americans against Covid is more critical than ever, especially as the new South Africa variant appears to inhibit antibody drugs.
“The South Africa variant is very concerning right now because it does appear that it may obviate some of our medical countermeasures, particularly the antibody drugs,†said the former FDA chief in the Trump administration in an interview on CNBC’s “The News with Shepard Smith†on Tuesday evening. “Right now that strain does appear to be prevalent in South America and Brazil, the two parts of the world, right now, that are in their summer, but also experiencing a very dense epidemic, and that’s concerning.
What in the world does he mean? “Obviate” means “remove”. It’s derived from the Latin o-/ob- (out) and via (way), therefore to get something out of the way. Does he mean that it resists antibody drugs? I don’t believe that even physicians use “obviate” in this sense. Do they?
If it resists antibody drugs, why would it not be resistant to antibodies and therefore vaccines as well?
As to the misuse of language I suspect it’s a case of what Chesterton called speaking Latin and Greek rather than plain English.
Don’t blame the doctor, he can’t read his own writing. 😉
Link to decent explanation.
https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/south-african-sars-cov-2-variant-alarms-scientists-68317
I think his usage was OK but “eliminate” would have been a more accessible word choice. He was not talking about the drug-virus interaction, just that the whole antibody class of drugs may have become useless.
Guilty as charged on the writing. Maybe the best benefit of EMRs is no handwriting errors.
Steve
I’m not sure what exactly Dr. Gottlieb means, but one of the things about antibody drugs I believe is that they have to be administered early as possible. If, as I’ve seen theorized, the greater transmissibility of this variant is due to increased asymptomatic or mild-symptomatic spread, then people infected with this variant are unlikely to receive any of the treatments that require early detection. This sort of raises the question of whether this would be all that bad, but the reason this sort of explanation might be offered is that there is no record of a virus becoming more virulent, over time they become less virulent and becoming less detectable is a way to accomplish that.
My wife gets her first dose of the vaccine tomorrow, so it looks like they have moved past front-line healthcare workers at her hospital quickly, about 50% of hospital employees have been vaccinated and since two-thirds have said they want a shot now, they are probably going to be done this week. It looks like there are similar numbers at the rival hospital, but they also extended the opportunity to outside physicians with privileges.
On the one hand, some of the people getting vaccinated are not in jobs with particular risk of infection or transmission, but on the other hand, seems like its going to be a lot quicker to organize vaccinations in health care facilities and long-term residences.
I think my speculations about asymptomatic spread about the South African variant are wrong, its the UK variant that is believed to be more transmissible.