Florida’s top doctor has launched a new battle against the White House over recent shortages of the monoclonal antibody treatment used to fight severe COVID-19 infection.
In a scathing letter sent on Tuesday, Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo charged the Biden administration with “actively preventing the effective distribution of monoclonal antibody treatments.” But the Department of Health and Human Services rejected those claims.
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“The federal government has and will continue to supply Florida with treatments that can help improve patient outcomes, reduce stress on healthcare facilities, and save lives. We have never stopped allocating or shipping COVID-19 therapeutics to Florida,” an HHS spokesman told the Washington Examiner.
The Biden administration took over the distribution of treatment shipments in September amid a national shortage. The federal government scaled back shipments of monoclonal antibody treatments to Florida and six other southern states, which accounted for 70% of orders nationwide. The department noted it was concerned those states would use up the finite supply, saying officials would “work to ensure our supply of these life-saving therapies remains available for all states and territories, not just some.”
Florida received more than 10,500 courses of monoclonal antibody treatments during the week ending on Monday, in addition to 11,050 doses the week prior, HHS said. A total of roughly 16,600 courses were allocated to the state in November, according to federal data.
“That’s in addition to the approximately 28,000 doses of product that they have on hand from their previous orders. In other words, Florida should have strong supply of product on hand — and more than most other states,” HHS said.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis was an early proponent of monoclonal antibody treatments and has directed the creation of over two dozen infusion sites around the state. Monoclonal antibody treatments, estimated to reduce the risk of hospitalization or death by 70% to 85%, prove useful to Florida hospitals straining to keep up with sick patients.
The infusion centers proliferated in August when roughly 28% of hospital beds in Florida were occupied by COVID-19 patients, accounting for more than any other state. Now that the government oversees distribution, DeSantis’s health officials are barred from placing orders for treatments with manufacturers directly.
“We’ve been thrown a major curveball here with a really huge cut,” DeSantis said when the government announced the change in September. “We’re going to make sure we leave no stone unturned. Whoever needs a treatment, we’re going to work like hell to get them the treatment.”
Monoclonal antibody treatments work in people at high risk of serious illness and who have tested positive but are not hospitalized. The treatment can also be used as a preventive measure in high-risk individuals if they have been exposed to the virus. The treatment works by infusing antibodies similar to the ones the immune system would make when confronted with a pathogen into the body. These antibodies are mass-produced to target the spike protein on the coronavirus and interfere with its ability to attach and gain entry into human cells.
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Several antibody treatments have been authorized in the United States to treat mild to moderate COVID-19 cases — Regeneron’s REGEN-COV, Eli Lilly’s bamlanivimab and etesevimab to be administered together, AstraZeneca’s Evusheld, and GlaxoSmithKline’s sotrovimab. The GSK antibody treatment is the only one proven effective against the omicron variant, which accounts for the vast majority of cases in some states. For instance, omicron accounts for 90% of cases in Texas, where officials warned on Monday that five infusion centers were out of sotrovimab.
Infusion centers that have run out or are running low on treatment courses will have to wait until federal distributors ship more next month.
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Caseloads in Florida have ballooned since the start of December, rising from an average of 1,300 cases per day the week ending Dec. 1 up to more than 26,000 on Tuesday, according to tracking from the New York Times. Hospitalizations, which always lag about two weeks behind new cases, have not skyrocketed to record levels during the late-summer surge.
This could be due to the state’s relatively high vaccination rate — more than 63% are fully vaccinated — and a level of overall population immunity gained through exposure to several variants of COVID-19 over previous surges. Research teams out of South Africa, England, and Scotland have provided evidence the omicron variant itself is less severe than the delta strain.
