Texas Governor Greg Abbott took to Twitter to accuse President Biden of hoarding the only monoclonal antibody drug effective against Omicron.
The state says the next shipment of Sotrovimab is scheduled for next month. In a tweet, the governor wrote "Biden vows full federal support to help states combat COVID. But he’s not. Biden is hoarding the anti-body therapeutic drugs & denying states independent access to that medical treatment. Now, he has stopped providing any of that medicine to Texas."
Rice University political scientist Mark Jones says this may be an unfair attack against the president, but under Mr. Biden's watch we have witnessed the Omicron surge. "The difficulty Biden faces is since it's the federal government in charge of this and managing this process, the buck stops on his desk rather than that of the governor's."
He says the White House did not forsee the Omicron surge. The federal government is trying to manage this through rationing the new drug.
Jones notes the president is not popular in Texas. "Given Biden's low approval rating, it's good politics to attack the president, particularly on topics where he is responsible. I think what Abbott was primarily doing was pushing back against the idea the states are responsible and instead trying to pin it on the federal government. The difficulty Abbott has is that Abbott and other red state governors have not done all they could to increase vaccination levels to the point where the severity of the Omicron surge would be more limited in states like Texas and Florida."
He says many observers on the right and left believe Biden has been too cautious and slow to react and that Biden should have done more to procure this drug. "As well as a lack of production by Merck and Pfizer of their anti-COVID drugs. Some of that has to fall on the federal government
because it's the only body that has the coordination, the power, the leverage and the money to ensure massive production of those types of drugs."
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