13th March 2020-2025
Did you know 1.8 million people in the UK are still shielding -i.e., living in lockdown condition {click here}? It was five years ago today that my wife and I closed our doors on the world. A few days after a pandemic was declared, and a week before the whole country was told to get into lockdown mode. That was then, when all was unknown. Yet in the UK we 1.8 million people are still in limbo i.e., in that same state of lockdown.
The plight of these people is pretty dire. By comparison we lonely pair are managing pretty well. Plenty like us are acknowledged as high risk of mental health issues, or financial strain, or both. Our biggest sacrifice is just the one shared with the family we do not get to see. The frustration, five years on, is that the medical solution has been available in other countries for several years. For context, the key issue hampering this category of people is that vaccines will not work, because immuno-suppression drugs are stopping the prompted normal immune system response. The solution to this dampening effect is a prophylactic injection; meaning the antibodies a vaccine prompts the body to create are instead injected straight into the patient. Well over two years ago a prophylactic product called Evusheld was released, today the upgraded version is Sipavibart.
The plight of these people is also totally of the UK Government’s own making. Specific to the UK, two key factors continue to be against us. Firstly, these injections are prohibitively expensive. It costs £6,000 a go every six months. Secondly, as the virus mutates, the approved drugs can become out-of-date, and the UK is very slow to respond. Compared to the rest of Europe and North America, the UK approvals lack urgency. Access to these drugs is also much more limited. HM Government hides behind The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE), who take far longer to do their checks than elsewhere {example here}. As campaign groups confirm, this delay is what happened to Evusheld – “Evusheld was assessed by NICE in January 2023, but by the time the lengthy process concluded, it was deemed ineffective against the current COVID-19 variants” {explained here}. Despite both issues, prophylactics are now a permanent marvel of medical progress set free upon the world, and our best hope here in the UK.
At the level of the individual, I am confident this will be our last anniversary. I will be paying taxes again soon, having kept busy whilst stuck at home by doing a full time PhD. These drugs will mean I can plan to escape back into the workplace and, if I must, I will find means to be paying outrageous private medical bills as I go. I can also then work at repaying debts to my family and society. That is fine for my wife and I. Others may not be so lucky for so-long-as HM Government keeps pretending they are not home.
…to be continued