(Vox) Covid-19 is once again trending upward in the United States, with new cases reaching more than 450,000 and deaths climbing up to 3,000 per week. But hospitals will have to face this year’s winter surge without a valuable tool. In late November, the Food and Drug Administration revoked its emergency use authorization for bebtelovimab, a monoclonal antibody treatment for Covid-19, because it wasn’t effective against the latest variants of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19. Now, there are no monoclonal antibody treatments left that work against BQ.1 and BQ.1.1., the subvariants of the omicron variant that are currently causing most new infections.
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