FL Surgeon General Blasts Biden Admin For Endangering Lives by Inhibiting Monoclonal Antibody Treatment – Opinion

According to a Maryland medical director, the actions taken by the Biden Administration to limit monoclonal antibodies treatments will lead to people being killed.

As we noted yesterday, the CDC made a rather large mistake when they claimed that more than 73 percent of the cases of COVID in the nation were Omicron cases in the week ending Dec. 18. It was actually only 22.5% of all cases.

What was the point of this important decision? Because then the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response halted the allocation of two antibody treatments made by Regeneron and Eli Lilly because they claimed they weren’t effective against Omicron. Fox stated that at the time, most cases were still being handled by the Delta variant.

Dr. Ron Elfenbein, the medical director and CEO of the First Call Medical Center in Gambrills, Maryland let loose, “I am as angry as I possibly can be about this.”

“The fact that these people are so adamant that they’re right when they’re using faulty data and they’re using faulty logic and frankly statistical modeling that has never been correct, ever, throughout this entire pandemic, to look at this, is just beyond the pale…. These people will most likely die or require hospitalization due to this. [health officials] misread the statistics.”

Maryland informed doctors about the Federal Government’s decision to end distribution.

“I don’t know how many people throughout the country are dead, dying, in the hospital, or about to be hospitalized because of the mistakes that they just made,” Dr. Elfenbein, who runs two monoclonal antibody clinics, said on Wednesday.

“It’s just the height of bureaucratic arrogance, and it’s just, it’s horrible. I had to turn friends away, family, people call me, ‘Oh, my uncle has cancer. Can he get an infusion?’ I’m like, ‘I cannot give you an infusion because I will lose my medical license.’”

I don’t know what kind of sense this makes because even if Omicron were more dominant at that point, why wouldn’t you want to distribute these treatments to the people they could still help? If you had one chance to save someone, why not give it that person? This seems insanely bureaucratic.

The Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response updated yesterday to say that the treatment of the antibodies in question would be halted for any state that has more than 80 percent Omicron. So if you happened to be in a state like that but got Delta, too bad you’re out of luck. How does that make sense? This would likely be needed by up to 20% of those who are eligible. It is absurd to apply statistics in this way. It would be absurd to not have this information available as needed. Does that seem too rational? They’re saying that treatment sites can still use the treatment if they can distinguish between the variants, but then they’re not getting the allocation from the government.

The Omicron variant was responsible in approximately 59 percent, leaving Delta at a large percentage. Why would anyone not wish to be able to access all possible treatment options?

But there’s another problem according to the Florida Surgeon General, Dr. Joseph Ladapo. While Omicron is 59 percent of cases across the country, it’s at about 78 percent in the HHS area that includes Florida. But they are not distributing Sotrovimab — the monoclonal treatment which appears to be more effective against Omicron — to Florida. He blasted this policy in a letter to HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra, saying this lack of allocation was causing “another immediate and life-threatening shortage of treatment options”

As @POTUSYesterday I stated that solving the pandemic at the state-level will be possible. I wrote to @HHSGov @SecBecerra: pic.twitter.com/1FRvimW9yB

— Joseph A. Ladapo, MD, PhD (@FLSurgeonGen) December 29, 2021

Ladapo said that federal agencies should not be limiting the state’s access to any available treatments.

“The federal government is actively preventing the effective distribution of monoclonal antibody treatments in the U.S. The sudden suspension of multiple monoclonal antibody therapy treatments from distribution to Florida removes a health care provider’s ability to decide the best treatment options for their patients in this state. This lack of vision is made more apparent by the fact that states were effectively forbidden from purchasing monoclonal antibodies for their own use.

There may be “no federal solution” but there surely are ways that the federal government can make it worse and the Biden team seems to be doing everything they can to find those ways.