Demand for Monoclonal Antibody Treatments Has Skyrocketed

without a doctor's prescription. Karen Weintraub, health reporter at USA Today joins us for how this underutilized treatment is gaining traction. Thanks for joining us, Karen, Thanks for having me. I wanted to talk about monoclonal antibody treatments right now. The demand for them is skyrocketing. We've seen Republican governors in Florida, Missouri, Texas touting them and saying that they're available to people, even opening up these infusion centers so you know, you

don't have to necessarily go to a hospital. You can go to one of these other places to get these treatments. But even Dr Fauci said these are very underutilized treatments for people that have COVID. So Karen tell us a little bit about them and then and how they're exploding right now. So there are very effective treatment for people in the earliest days of a COVID infection who are

at high risk. So somebody who is over sixty five, who's obese, who is diabetic, who has autoimmune issues, all of those categories of people are considered at high risk for a serious infection with COVID nineteen. If they get these drugs within generally about three or four days after their first diagnosed or they have developed symptoms, it reduces their risk of hospitalization and death by at least seventy which is a lot obviously, so they're very effective. They

have minimal side effects. The issue is they're difficult to deliver. Generally, they're delivered via infusion. It takes about a half hour of sitting with a drift going into your arm, and then they have to watch you for an hour to make sure you don't have a bad reaction. Because people who are getting these are highly contagious, it can't get them in a typical infusion center where you might go if you are on dialysis, for instance, or on getting

cancer care. You obviously don't want to mix people with with those can Asians with people who are contagious with COVID, so they need separate facilities, and some of them are in hospital parking lots. Some of them, as you said, are in especially designed clinics. But that's been a challenge for some hospitals and medical facilities to set up these infusion centers. And what drugs are we talking about here? I know regeneration is one of them. That's the one

that President Trump was receiving when he had COVID. Texas Governor Greg Abbott he was receiving the regeneration as well. But there's another one too, and UH cannot pronounce it for the life of me. The regeneral on drug is called regim dash cove and the other one so Trova MAB that anything that ends in the letters m AB

is that's for monoclonal antibody. So the ones there, there are three that are approved for COVID, but the one made by Lily unfortunately no longer works against the delta variants, so that one has been is not being distributed anymore. So the regenera on one is the one that you're likely to get if you go to a clinic or hospital. At the moment, that's the vast majority of it once

being distributed now from that company. And what kind of numbers are we seeing Because you mentioned the article that a typical week in June, monoclon anybodies were given in about ten people, and this was across the entire Houston metropolitan area. This past week, I guess patients were getting it in that same area, right, I thought that was

astounding that number. Um, that's what they told me at Houston Methodist Hospital, and then nationally where General sent out about twenty five thousand doses a week just a month ago and this week the hundred and sixty eight thousand doses. So demand really is increasing substantially. Unfortunately, because so many people are getting sick with COVID the surge, especially with the delta variant, a lot of people are getting sick

and also people at high risk for serious disease. And because of the experience that doctors had during the last surge and saw that these monocle land of bodies were helpful, they're turning to the more eagerly now, I guess, I

would say because of that success. And there's a couple of interesting actions taken in some of these states as well where I guess a surgeon general in Florida said, well, you don't even need a doctor's recommendation to take is if you're sick or you feel like you're getting sick, go to an infusion center and we can treat you with this now. And I guess because we've up you paid for a lot of these up front, it is

still free to a lot of people. It should be free. Um, they cost about a dose, but the government prepurchased over a million and a half of these doses and there's still many available. The benefit is much greater for somebody who is at higher risk again, somebody who's over sixty five, who's a beast diabetic, i mean know, compromised, than it is to an otherwise healthy person who is very unlikely to end up hospitalized anyway. So generally they are recommended

for people who have some extra risk. Yeah, definitely, And and and all of these monoclone anybody's have been approved under emergency use authorization, so they haven't received full approval yet either, right. Yeah. The doctor in Houston was sort of laughing about the idea that a lot of the people he's treating now monoclona anibodies didn't want vaccines because they were approved only emergency under an emergency use authorization. But now they're they're begging for a monocle goals, which

are also approved only under an emergency use authorization. Karen, I wanted to ask because I follow you on Twitter and I saw you had recently went on a vacation and it was kind of ruined by a bad test, a bad COVID test where you and I think your parents said that you were tested positive and then later on you got a PCR test and it came out negative. So not to name any companies or anything, but how

did that experience go? Because we had for a long time been hearing you know that some of these quick tests aren't always as reliable. They're supposed to be very good. In this case, we got caught on the wrong end of the statistics. I guess this particular test has a three or four percent failure rate. Shouldn't happen to three of us in the same batch of tests. The company has told me that they're checking the batch to make

sure there's not something wrong with it. But yes, I have an eighty six year old high risk father, so when I wasn't feeling well. I got a quick test to make sure I didn't have a problem. When it was positive, we all kind of freaked out. Father and mother went to the hospital to get Monacola antibodies actually, and there they were retested appropriately and we're told they did not, in fact have COVID. By that point, I was already five hours into my six hour trip home.

Um and uh so, yeah, um so. I retested, got another different brand rapid test that night, and then got a PCR the next day, also negative. My brother, who had been with us to day before, spent a lot of money changing his flight back to the West Coast, so it was to avoid contaminating anyone in case he got sick. So it was a lot of chaos created from from a false positive. It's better clinically speaking, health wise to get a false positive and a false negative.

False negative means you're contagious and you don't know it, and you might go out and infect other people. So that's worse from the societal perspective, but it definitely ruined my family vacation. Well, glad to hear everybody was healthy at least on all of that. Karen Weintraub Health reporter at USA Today. Thank you very much for joining us. Thank you. I'm Oscar Romiris and this has been reopening America.

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