Biden’s hospitals, drug companies and government officials are rushing to address one of the biggest threats posed by the Omicron variant: two of the three monoclonal antibody treatments doctors have depended on to prevent Covid-19 patients from becoming seriously ill, don’t seem to thwart the latest version of the coronavirus.
The only treatment likely to work against Omicron is now so scarce that many doctors and hospitals have already used up their supplies.
Monoclonal antibodies have become a mainstay of Covid treatment, which have been shown to be highly effective at preventing high-risk patients from being hospitalized. But even as infections rise and Omicron becomes the dominant form of new cases in the United States, some hospitals have begun to scale back on treatments, fearing they may have suddenly become useless.
In New York, hospital administrators from NewYork-Presbyterian, NYU Langone and Mount Sinai all said in recent days they would stop giving patients the two most commonly used antibody treatments, made by Eli Lilly and Regeneron, according to memos obtained by The Times and officials from the health systems.
“This is a dramatic change in the past week or so,” says Dr. Daniel Griffin, an infectious disease specialist at Columbia University in New York. “And I think it makes sense.”
Federal health officials plan to assess by the end of this week whether to suspend shipments of the Eli Lilly and Regeneron products to individual states, based on how dominant Omicron is becoming in different regions of the country, according to a senior government official who spoke. on condition of anonymity.
The only monoclonal antibody treatment that has performed well against Omicron in lab experiments is also the most recently approved: sotrovimab, made by GlaxoSmithKline and Vir Biotechnology and approved in May.
