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I absolutely believe it was beneficial, he said. It was better than sliced bread.
Monoclonal antibody treatments like the one Weiss took and another one produced by Regeneron that was given to President
Donald Trump have shown promising signs in fighting the disease if given early in the infection. But the drugs aren t being widely used by the general public. A shortage of staff that can administer the drugs, which have to be given via IV drips, combined with delays in Covid-19 testing have limited their use, hospital administrators and public health specialists said. Insufficient data
There s a level of uncertainty around the value of the antibody treatments, said Marta Wosinska, deputy director at the Duke-Margolis Center for Health Policy, speaking last week at an event hosted by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine. The only available data on the treatments have come from small clinical trials.
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BY MARCY SHORTUSE- For Dr. Richard Novak, a “vacation” in the time of COVID-19 is a bit of an oxymoron, yet he is giving it a try this week at one of his favorite places, Little Gasparilla Island. He heads the Division of Infectious Diseases at the University of Illinois-Chicago and has led HIV clinical care and vaccine research efforts for more than 25 years. Novak is now also known as “the man behind UIC’s COVID-19 vaccine Phase III clinical trial,” so it’s no stretch of the imagination to figure out he is taking phone interviews and fielding questions about the virus everywhere he goes. His name is now known worldwide as being synonymous with some of the most groundbreaking studies regarding this mysterious virus that has come upon us in the United States and changed our way of living.
The Rhode Island Blood Center this month started testing donors’ blood for the presence of coronavirus-fighting antibodies.
The initiative is an effort to identify people who can donate their plasma. If people have gotten the new coronavirus and recovered from it, their plasma a component of their blood might help people who are currently fighting the disease.
“It’s still very much a tool that doctors use to treat patients in hospitals,” said Kara LeBlanc, marketing and communications manager for the blood center.
The antibody testing started on Dec. 14, and will be in place at all its centers around the state and its mobile events. Other sites in the country were already testing for antibodies, but Rhode Island didn’t have enough virus cases to justify the high cost, LeBlanc said. That changed with the second surge in Rhode Island, which has seen thousands of new cases a week.