GOP governors find new ways to make the pandemic worse

GOP governors find new ways to make the pandemic worse

Opinion by 

Paul Waldman

Columnist

Today at 3:55 p.m. EDT

“I learned so much about coronavirus,” then-President Donald Trump said after he caught covid-19 last year and was attended by a large team of medical personnel and treated with just about every therapy known to humanity. “Don’t let it dominate you. Don’t be afraid of it. You’re going to beat it.”

At the time, the idea that one thing could provide nearly complete protection seemed like a fantasy. Then we got vaccines, and they turned out to be incredible — even as the delta variant does its best to penetrate them.

But while he was president, Trump kept promising a miracle cure — maybe hydroxychloroquine (remember that?), or maybe injecting disinfectant into your veins, all while he denigrated the kind of public health measures needed to keep an entire population safe.

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Trump’s spirit lives on in his party, as does his approach to the pandemic. The same Republican governors doing everything they can to thwart the achievement of true herd immunity by the safest means possible — banning schools from requiring masks, making it illegal for private businesses to require proof of vaccination — are now gravitating toward their own miracle cure.

Unlike the solutions Trump favored, this one — monoclonal antibody treatment — is actually useful. But it’s not a miracle that will deliver us from the pandemic. In fact, by elevating it to the level they are, these governors could actually make it harder for us to defeat the virus.

Politico reports:

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Republican governors in some of the states hardest hit by the pandemic are pushing expensive Covid cocktails over cheap masks.

The governors in Florida, Missouri and Texas are promising millions of dollars in antibody treatments for infected people even as they oppose vaccine and mask mandates, saying they can potentially keep people with mild Covid symptoms out of hospitals that are being swamped by new cases. But the treatments and cost of providing them are thousands of dollars more than preventive vaccines, and tricky to administer because they work best early in the course of an infection.

Let’s be clear about this: The antibody treatments seem to be very effective in certain situations, but they’re useful only for people who have mild symptoms. Regeneron’s own research says its antibody cocktail reduces hospitalization or death in patients who had not yet been hospitalized — in other words, those in early phases of the disease — by 70 percent. Which is quite good, but it’s not a cure, especially for those in more advanced stages of the disease.

Nevertheless, Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida is setting up antibody centers around his state and promoting them in national and local media. The result is that at least some extremely ill people are showing up to the centers in the apparent belief that they’ll be cured.

Though the antibody treatments are being offered free of charge, they’re far more expensive than vaccines; the government is paying $2,100 per dose of the antibody treatment, compared to between $20 and $40 for vaccines.

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But that’s not the real problem. The real problem is that when the message you send to people amounts to “Don’t worry about all that masking and the vaccines — if you get sick you can just get the antibody treatment and you’ll be fine” — you wind up doing far more harm than good.

The inevitable result of GOP governors such as DeSantis and Greg Abbott of Texas promoting antibody treatment is that fewer people will get vaccinated, because they’ll no longer think it’s necessary to protect themselves and their loved ones. They will likely be the same people not taking other precautions, including masking. If they get infected, they will then spread covid to the people around them.

And yes, they or some of the people they infect might get to an antibody center in time for that treatment to help them. But not, in many cases, before they do more damage.

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You can see the danger in a segment DeSantis did on Sean Hannity’s Fox News program Wednesday night, where he came to tout the new antibody centers, which the two men quite clearly presented as better than getting vaccinated.

“The data’s very clear — you and I know people,” DeSantis said. “They took this, they had symptoms, and it was resolved. It can keep you out of the hospital and it can save your life.”

Hannity was even more explicit: “The science shows the vaccine will not necessarily protect you, it’s not protecting many people,” he said, an utter lie.

This message is being delivered to an audience of Fox News viewers who have gotten a steady drumbeat of anti-vaccine propaganda for months. And that’s why the way antibody treatments are being sold — not as one of many tools in the public health arsenal, the most important of which is vaccination, but as a substitute for vaccination — is so dangerous.

We know that on the whole, Republicans are losing the argument with the public about measures to address the pandemic, including vaccines and mask mandates. But they’ll keep finding new ways to make it harder for us to get to the end of this nightmare.