Variation of the fine structure constant in the light of recent helium abundance measurement

We point out that the recent result of primordial helium-4 ($^4$He) abundance measurement by EMPRESS, which has reported a smaller $^4$He abundance than other measurements, can be well fitted by assuming a time-variation of the fine structure constant $\alpha$ which is slightly smaller than the present value during big bang nucleosynthesis (BBN). We find that the EMPRESS result in combination with deuterium abundance measurement indicates $-2.6\% <\Delta\alpha/\alpha <-1.4 \%$ (68\% C.L.) where $\Delta \alpha$ is the difference between the values of $\alpha$ at the BBN and present epochs, while $-1.2\% <\Delta\alpha/\alpha