THROUGHOUT this pandemic, the world's health agencies have promoted vaccination as the medicinal spearhead against COVID-19, pouring scorn on the use of such existing products as the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine and the parasite treatment ivermectin.
And vaccines will remain the key to controlling COVID, with federal Health Minister Greg Hunt yesterday announcing we will soon have the Moderna vaccine - as well as AstraZeneca and Pfizer - pending approval by the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) in the coming weeks.
Like the Pfizer jab, Moderna is an mRNA product that needs storage at minus 70 degrees Celsius.
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But Mr Hunt and the chief Commonwealth health officer, Paul Kelly, had another card up their sleeves yesterday, unveiling plans to introduce a new non-vaccine treatment called sotrovimab.
This is also before the TGA, with expectations it will be available by the end of the year.
Adding sotrovimab to the COVID arsenal is another sign of how fast the medical world is moving against the evolving threat posed by the virus in all of its variants.
Sotrovimab belongs to a new class of medicines known as "monoclonal antibodies", designed to produce a targeted immune response, and increasingly used in cancer treatment.
In a September 2019 article - a few months before the emergence of COVID - the Mayo Clinic described them as "laboratory-produced molecules engineered to serve as substitute antibodies that can restore, enhance or mimic the immune system's attack on cancer cells".
Last month the famed not-for-profit US medical centre said two types of monoclonal antibodies had been shown in trials to reduce hospitalisation in high-risk patients, but they had to be administered early.
The introduction of such new products - sotrovimab was approved for emergency use in the US on May 21 - will raise concerns for some.
But whatever role such treatments ultimately play in this country, vaccination - backed by lockdown restrictions - will remain the main game.
And that's whether yesterday's NSW total of 262 cases is the start of a sustained reduction, or whether it's more likely to be the numbers "jumping around" a bit, as Premier Gladys Berejiklian put it yesterday.
Still, the small increase in Hunter cases over the weekend can only be taken as good news.
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