In a letter this week, Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo charged Biden’s appointees are “actively preventing the effective distribution of monoclonal antibody treatments.”
In September alone, he said, the state provided “life-saving treatment to nearly 100,000 patients.”
But then, he charged, “Without any advanced notice, the U.S. Department of Heath and Human Services announced a dramatic reduction in the number of monoclonal antibodies to be allocated to the state of Florida.”
He said the governor moved to acquire other supplies, but, “the lack of allocation of this life-saving treatment from the federal government continues to cause another immediate and life-threatening shortage of treatment options to the state of Florida as the omicron variant spreads.”
“The federal agencies under your control should not limit our state’s access to any available treatments for COVID-19. … This shortsightedness is especially evident given that the federal government effectively prohibited states from purchasing these monoclonal antibodies and serving their populations directly,” he wrote.
Fox News explained Biden “recently paused shipments of COVID-19 antibody treatments manufactured by major drug companies Regeneron and Eli Lilly amid claims that such treatments are not effective against the omicron variant of the coronavirus.”
Ladapo had referenced Biden’s decision to back the federal government out of the problem, when Biden said, this week, “There is no federal solution. This gets solved at the state level.”
Arkansas Republican Gov. Asa Hutchinson had warned Biden against letting “federal solutions stand in the way of state solutions.”