Biden's team tightens grip on state use of Covid antibody treatments - POLITICO

The Biden administration is imposing new limits on states’ ability to access to Covid-19 antibody treatments amid rising demand from GOP governors who have relied on the drug as a primary weapon against the virus.

That threatens to heighten tensions between the Biden administration and governors like Florida’s Ron DeSantis, who have emerged as vocal opponents of the federal Covid-19 response.

Still, until recently, the administration had shipped the antibody treatments to states on an as-needed basis — with top health officials in early August going as far as encouraging those battling the Delta surge to seek even more supply.

But demand from a handful of southern states has exploded since then, state and federal officials said, raising concerns they were consuming a disproportionate amount of the national supply.

In Tennessee, health department spokesperson Sarah Tanksley told POLITICO the additional scrutiny of state orders was already resulting in delays getting the drugs to providers.

Yet administration officials have bristled in recent weeks over the southern states’ reliance on expensive treatments paid for by the federal government — even as several governors have attacked Biden over his attempts to boost the vaccination rate and tamp down caseloads.

“It’s where the surges are,” said Marcus Plescia, chief medical officer of the Association for State and Territorial Health Officials, of the rising demand for monoclonal antibody drugs.

Once the Covid-19 vaccines rolled out across the nation and caseloads fell, demand for monoclonal antibody drugs dropped, allowing the government to more freely dole them out as needed.

In the face of that rising demand, the Biden administration has also scrambled to accelerate manufacturing of the drugs; already, the government has upped its overall weekly shipment to 150,000 doses from 100,000