Opens new battle with Biden

DeSantis opens new battle with Biden over Covid treatments

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration on Monday cut Florida’s weekly allotment of monoclonal antibody cocktails.

By AREK SARKISSIAN

Gov. Ron DeSantis has picked a new fight with the Biden administration over Covid treatments.

DeSantis shut down the five state administration sites he opened last week after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration on Monday cut Florida’s weekly allotment of monoclonal antibody cocktails. DeSantis fired back at the Biden administration for pulling the medicines, claiming the federal government withdrew the treatments without evidence. 

“Without a shred of clinical data to support this action, Biden has forced trained medical professionals to choose between treating their patients or breaking the law,” DeSantis said in a statement late Monday night. “This indefensible edict takes treatment out of the hands of medical professionals and will cost some Americans their lives.”

DeSantis’ criticism came after the FDA stated that two monoclonal treatments, each made by Regeneron and Eli Lilly, are not effective against the Omicron variant, which is responsible for the vast majority of infections in the U.S. Federal officials would rather save those doses for use on other variants.

DeSantis’ closure of the treatment centers is the latest rift between Florida and the Biden administration over Covid. Over the summer and early fall, DeSantis and Biden fought over the Republican governor’s refusal to allow mask mandates in schools — a conflict that led the U.S. Department of Education’s civil rights office to open an investigation into whether Florida was violating the rights of students with disabilities.

In September, DeSantis attacked the Biden administration for distributing monoclonal treatments to states across the nation while Florida and a handful of southern states at the time were taking up the bulk of antibody treatment orders.  

Monoclonal antibody treatments have been proven to help people recover from the infection faster, but experts believe their effectiveness depends on the strain of the virus. Already, some hospitals in New York City have said they would stop providing the Regeneron and Eli Lilly treatments to patient, according to The New York Times. DeSantis has also heavily pushed the treatments.

A spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services on Tuesday said the agency continues to provide medicines that have been shown to be effective in treating omicron, including antiviral pills from Pfizer and Merck.

“The Administration is focused on making sure that, if an American gets sick with COVID-19, they get a treatment that actually works,” the HHS spokesperson said in a statement. “Both Regeneron and Eli Lilly say their monoclonal antibody treatments are ineffective against Omicron [and] several independent studies have also shown they aren’t working against Omicron.”

Covid-19 has killed more than 63,000 people in Florida since the first infections were reported nearly two years ago. It was ravaged by the Delta variant over the summer leading to record-breaking hospitalizations but has generally fared better under the less-deadly but more transmissible Omicron variant.

DeSantis and state Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo have argued that all of the monoclonals made available by the Health and Human Services Department are at least somewhat effective.

“The Federal Government has failed to adequately provide the United States with adequate outpatient treatment options for COVID-19,” Ladapo wrote in the same statement sent by the governor’s office. “Now, they are scrambling to cover up a failure to deliver on a promise to ‘shut down the virus.'”

The state Department of Health, which Ladapo oversees as the agency’s secretary, announced late Monday that it was closing state-run monoclonal antibody treatment administration sites “until further notice.”

A federal database shows that Florida is still slated to receive 34,216 doses of monoclonal treatments from the Health and Human Services agency this week. This total includes 3,216 doses of sotrovimab, which is proven to be effective against treating the Omicron variant.