After moving to limit supplies for a handful of states earlier this month, the Biden administration is further tightening its grip on states’ access to monoclonal antibodies following a dramatic surge in demand for the life-saving treatments in states with high coronavirus cases and low vaccination rates—despite the president just last week vowing to ramp up distribution of the drugs.
The Department of Health and Human Services is starting to allocate treatments to states based on case levels and usage of the treatments according to a policy introduced Monday, a senior HHS official told Forbes.
This marks a shift from the agency’s distribution strategy over the past few months which allowed states to freely order supplies, and reverts back to how the HHS distributed the drugs between November 2020 and February 2021, before they were widely available.
The change, which is all but certain to reduce supply in some hard-hit states in the Southeast, comes after the HHS earlier this month warned a group of seven states relying heavily on the treatments that they would need to cut back on their orders.
HHS officials stressed at the time that they had not shifted back to an allocation process, but have since changed course, though the senior official emphasized to Forbes that these changes are intended to be “temporary.”
Regeneron and Eli Lilly both announced this week they have come to new purchasing agreements with the federal government, which has secured 1.4 million doses and 388,000 million doses from the drugmakers, respectively.
The Biden administration is publishing weekly breakdowns of the distribution of its 150,000 monoclonal antibody doses on its website, with this week’s report revealing Florida, Texas, Mississippi, Tennessee and Alabama as the states given the most treatments.
As part of its newly announced comprehensive plan for combating the delta variant, the Biden administration last week pledged to accelerate the distribution of monoclonal antibodies.
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