Perhaps the quickest way to confine a Covid treatment to obscurity is for it to work. From Mark Glennon at wirepoints.org:
It’s perhaps the most effective way to save your life if you are infected with COVID-19, but probably the least known. It reduces the risk of even being hospitalized by 70% to 85%, though it must be administered early to be effective – within four days of infection. Lives probably are being lost unnecessarily because people don’t know about it.
It’s monoclonal antibody treatment, abbreviated as mAb. To the extent the public has any familiarity with it, they may know it as Regeneron, though that’s actually the name of the company that makes the leading treatment, REGEN-COV2, and there are several other mAbs from other makers.
Health authorities for months back should have been issuing this message constantly: “Immediately after being exposed or you have COVID symptoms, get tested and ask if an antibody treatment is right for you.”
But they didn’t. They still aren’t. At least not in Illinois and most of the nation.
Why not?
No reasonable explanation is evident and a significant number of lives may have been lost because of the failure to inform the public properly. And now, with antibody treatments getting more attention, the treatments must be rationed, adding to the tragedy. At least in part, the explanation is a sad one – politics, and politicized media.
The effectiveness of REGEN and other antibody treatments has been known since at least November when the Food and Drug Administration granted emergency authorization for REGEN and another mAb. Earlier tests had found REGEN to be over 70% effective in heading off serious illness and multiple subsequent tests have confirmed it. “Many of us were talking about this as early as March [2020] wrote Scott Gottlieb, a former FDA commissioner. “Regeneron did extraordinary work to secure their own manufacturing, but we needed a concerted industrial effort to get the supply we needed.”
