Monoclonal antibody drugs are supposed to help people with mild to moderate COVID-19 avoid the hospital, but it can be a challenge to find out where the treatment is offered. NPR has heard from people across the country who have been frustrated by this.
They include Shirley Wagoner, an 80-year-old who still hits the ski slopes and helps run the family plumbing business in Spokane Valley, Wash.
First, her sons fell ill and were diagnosed with COVID-19. Then on the Monday after Christmas she came down with the symptoms of a bad cold, including a sore throat and laryngitis.
She went to her doctor’s office for a coronavirus test and learned on New Year’s Eve that she was also sick.
Her son-in-law, Myron Lee, who lives near Chicago, had been tracking the disease closely and knew his mother-in-law would be a candidate for treatment with monoclonal antibodies.
These are drugs available nationwide through an emergency authorization. They’re designed to bind to the coronavirus to prevent it from invading cells. The government allocates the drug to states, which in turn decide how the drugs are distributed. Uptake has been irregular, in part because the medicines are cumbersome to deliver – they’re given by infusion. A committee convened by the National Institutes of Health is also not confident that the drugs actually work.
Even so, the Food and Drug Administration granted their emergency use, judging that the potential benefits outweigh the potential risks. So, Lee set about looking for somewhere in Spokane where his mother-in-law could get treated. He contacted the two companies that make the drug, Eli Lilly and Regeneron, to find it in Spokane. Information from them was discouraging.
“The weird thing is Spokane’s a pretty major city in the Inland Northwest,” Lee says. “It’s kind of a medical center for the whole Inland Northwest, but there’s not one place in Spokane that has the Eli Lilly drug.”
A representative from the Eli Lilly hotline (855-LillyC19) gave him phone numbers of facilities within a few hours’ drive. (Regeneron’s hotline is 844-734-6643.)
Wagoner started calling around, including to her own doctor’s office, which falsely informed her she would need to be hospitalized to be eligible for the drug. In fact, hospitalized patients aren’t eligible for this treatment because clinical tests indicated they were only effective early in the disease.
“Then I called the Washington state public health [department], and they’d never heard of either therapeutic,” Wagoner said.
State health officials eventually told Lee to call the big hospital in Spokane, but he simply got the runaround there and never learned whether it provides the treatment. Wagoner finally found a clinic about an hour and a half’s drive away that would see her, but only if she could find a doctor in that town who would prescribe it.
“And then I got to thinking, by the time I had my husband drive me there, have the doctor appointment, get the infusion, which takes an hour, and then they keep you two hours to make sure you don’t have a reaction, and drive home, it would almost be too much for me,” Wagoner said. “It was overwhelming.”
