The White House claims red states are consuming a disproportionate number of antibody treatment doses because of low vaccination rates.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki is using a misleading argument about COVID-19 vaccination rates in Florida and Texas to justify the Biden administration’s decision to curb the supply of monoclonal antibodies — an effective treatment option for COVID-19 — being distributed to these states.
The federal government has only recently decided to take over the distribution of the antibody treatments, which Florida governor Ron DeSantis was an early proponent of. Abruptly, the federal Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced on Tuesday that it would be cutting the supply provided to Florida. The administration “did not provide any indication of any upcoming limitation to supply,” during communications between the state and department the day prior, according to DeSantis’s press secretary Christina Pushaw.
The decision to begin rationing doses marks a departure from the policy articulated by the administration earlier this month. On September 8, Dr. John Redd, chief medical officer for HHS’s emergency preparedness and response office, insisted that “we have not transitioned back to an allocation process.”
Psaki defended the reversal by arguing that it is the administration’s job to provide for an equitable distribution of the treatments among the states. She also erroneously cited low vaccination rates in Florida and Texas as the reason for a recent surge in cases in those states.
On Thursday, she asserted that “monoclonal antibodies are lifesaving therapies that are used after infection to prevent more severe outcomes. So clearly the way to protect people and save more lives is to get them vaccinated so that they don’t get COVID to begin with. But over the last month, given the rising cases due to the delta variant and the lowered number of vaccination rates in some of these states — like Florida, like Texas — just seven states are making up 70 percent of the orders. Our supply is not unlimited and we believe it should be equitable across states across the country.”
“I think our role as the government overseeing the entire country is to be equitable in how we distribute, we’re not going to give a greater percentage to Florida over Oklahoma,” added Psaki.
While a good-faith debate could be had over the merits of the White House’s new, centralized distribution policy, it’s more difficult to digest Psaki vaccination rate-dependent justification.
According to the New York Times, Florida ranks 18th among the states in terms of the proportion of its adult population inoculated with at least one does of the vaccine, and it has a higher full vaccination rate than states such as Illinois and Michigan. Texas meanwhile, ranks 25th in the first category, and ahead of Nevada and North Carolina in the second.
Neither President Biden nor Psaki have been critical of Illinois, Michigan, Nevada, and North Carolina or their Democratic governors for “lowered vaccination rates.” On the other hand, DeSantis and Texas governor Greg Abbott have sparred with the president on a number of issues, but especially on the subject of COVID and how best to balance the public health challenge it represents with other priorities.
It’s also notable that while the vaccines have proven resilient in preventing hospitalization and death amidst the Delta variant outbreak, breakthrough cases have been far more common since it supplanted the original viral strain as the most common in the U.S. At a press conference on Thursday, DeSantis noted that at a Broward County site where antibody doses are being distributed, 52 percent of the patients and a whopping 69 percent of patients over the age of 60 had been vaccinated.
“I think that the message is you do need to have treatment as an important component when you’re dealing with COVID,” said DeSantis.
Biden has angrily implored GOP governors to “at least get out of the way of the people who are trying to do the right thing.” As recently as this week, DeSantis told Politico reporter Marc Caputo that “I think the data is very clear on the vaccinations, you’re much less likely to be hospitalized or die if you’re vaccinated. If you look, I think the hospitalizations skew four to one, in favor of people who are unvaccinated, which really is understating the difference because most people are vaccinated.”