DannyDuberstein said:
I'm not pushing Ivermectin. I just find people spiking the football on it with nothing else to offer to be fairly offputting as well
I also think the lack of education and push on monoclonal when it was working to be extremely disappointing. Lots of folks were having to learn about it and seek treatment based on message boards, bot their doctor.
One of the 3 main monoclonal antibody treatments DOES work against omicron but it is now in very short supply. More of it is on the way but it will won't be available for a few weeks.
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The one monoclonal antibody treatment that has performed well against Omicron in laboratory experiments is also the most recently authorized: sotrovimab, made by GlaxoSmithKline and Vir Biotechnology and cleared in May.
Already in high demand even before Omicron arose, the supply of sotrovimab is very limited for now. But the situation is likely to improve somewhat in the coming weeks. The Biden administration is in talks with GlaxoSmithKline about securing more doses to be delivered by early next year, the administration official said.
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When the coronavirus variants began emerging a year ago, researchers found that some had gained resistance to monoclonal antibodies. A mutation to their surface proteins prevented the antibodies from sticking to the viruses, a necessary step in neutralizing them.
For several months, the government paused distribution of Eli Lilly's antibody treatment nationwide because it proved ineffective against variants such as Gamma, which emerged in Brazil and spread to many countries last spring.
Fortunately, doctors could still give out Regeneron's treatment, which remained effective against the variants and was in abundant supply. Other variants largely vanished from the United States as Delta surged to dominance this summer.
Delta proved susceptible to all of the authorized antibody treatments. The Biden administration gave the green light to Eli Lilly's treatment once more and ordered hundred of thousands of doses.
But Omicron has changed everything.
When the new variant was identified last month in southern Africa, researchers began laboratory studies testing monoclonal antibodies to see how well they worked against it. Scientists found that both Regeneron and Lilly's antibodies did a poor job of blocking the variant virus from invading cells. Sotrovimab, by contrast, remained potent.
George Scangos, the chief executive of Vir, attributed the resilience of sotrovimab to the strategy researchers used to find it. Rather than look in the blood of Covid survivors, researchers examined the blood of people who had survived the 2003 SARS epidemic, caused by a related coronavirus.
They identified an antibody from a SARS survivor that also protected against the coronavirus that caused Covid. That double action suggested that the sotrovimab antibody attached itself to a part of the virus that has changed very little over the course of its evolution. And it would be unlikely to change in new variants, the researchers reasoned.
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"I think we got here not by good luck, but by a thoughtful process," Dr. Scangos said.
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When it became clear that Omicron was gaining a foothold, the government allocated 55,000 sotrovimab doses to states, with shipments arriving as soon as this week. GSK is expected in January to deliver 300,000 more doses to the United States.
"What matters most is the supply we can have in January and February and March, and we're doing everything we can to increase that," Dr. Scangos said.
Kathleen Quinn, a spokeswoman for GSK, said that the companies are "actively working to expand our capacity," adding another production facility and accelerating production plans.
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Dr. Griffin, who sees patients in New York City, said he expects difficult conversations now that major health systems have halted their use until the more effective treatment arrives.
Vaccinated patients should still do well, he said. But those most likely to be upset will be patients who "didn't want to get vaccinated but thought, 'I can trust the monoclonals. If I need them, they'll be there for me.'"
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/21/health/covid-monoclonal-antibodies-omicron.htmlQuote:
Both Regeneron and Eli Lilly say they are developing monoclonal antibodies for Omicron, but it will be months before they are ready for use
