It’s Been About Six months since the Pharmaceutical maker AstraZeneca released a COVID-19 antibody treatment called Evusheld. It’s designed to stop COVID-19 from infecting people with weak immune systems. For many of them, the COVID vaccine doesn’t work. The government has approved Evusheld for emergency use and is in charge of buying and distributing it, as it was for COVID vaccines when they first rolled out.
But there’s been a disconnect between the amount of Evusheld the government bought and how much is getting to patients, said Marcia Boyce, who suffers from a blood cancer called chronic lymphocytic leukemia. The drugs she takes for her condition suppress her immune system. So after getting the COVID vaccine, she got tested to see if she had antibodies.
“For me, personally, I had zero. So after the two vaccines and a booster, I had still zero protection from COVID. I was upset,” Boyce said.
Evusheld works by delivering those antibodies directly. Boyce heard about it on a CLL Facebook group, then started one on Evusheld. “Everybody was talking about it and couldn’t wait to get it,” she said.
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“In the beginning, there were only four places in Florida that had it. I called all of them, and they only were doing it for their patients,” Boyce said.
She finally found a small, private clinic near Fort Lauderdale that could provide her with doses of Evusheld. As it turns out, that clinic had received more Evusheld doses than any other provider in Florida, including some of the state’s largest hospitals.
Dr. Dorry Segev, a transplant surgeon at New York University, said that’s not an isolated case. “The rollout of Evusheld has been complicated, confusing and frustrating for many people.”
He said that from the beginning, the math didn’t add up. The Biden administration ordered 1.7 million doses for the more than 7 million Americans who are immunocompromised. Yet by some estimates, around three-quarters of those Evusheld doses may have gone unused.