We’re confused, and we don’t mind admitting it. Because one of the only things we heard during Joe Biden’s nearly interminable angry rant last week attacking his fellow Americans for their reticence to take a vaccine which isn’t actually a vaccine (more on that below) was that he announced he’d be taking steps to expand the availability of monoclonal antibody infusions to people who’ve tested positive for COVID-19.

This was the only thing in that speech which was even remotely useful in terms of actually fighting to get the country back to normal. Biden’s harangues about forcing people to take a COVID vaccine certainly didn’t do that; all they did was to further politicize a disease which is already the most politicized medical condition in human history.

Biden wasn’t the first player on the scene where monoclonal antibodies were concerned. In Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis has invested a great deal of effort making those infusions available to the public, and by all indications they really work. Folks we’ve talked to who have had them swear by them; inside of 24 hours after the infusions, COVID symptoms are gone.

Of course, they say that about hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin as well. But the difference is that while the medical establishment is running an abject jihad against those antiviral drugs, with the eager assistance of the legacy media and the tyrannical social media censorship platforms like Facebook and Twitter, the Doc Bloc seems to actually support the monoclonal antibody treatments. The number they’re putting out there is that monoclonal antibodies reduce hospitalization in COVID patients with at least medium symptoms by 70 percent.

They must really work, since that’s what President Trump took when he was diagnosed with COVID and he was well again three days later. You’d expect, based on the pattern the establishment has shown, that would have been the death knell for Regeneron and the rest.

But while Biden has said nothing but vaccine-vaccine-vaccine and mask-mask-mask, he did let it slip out that he’s pushing the monoclonal antibodies.

All right then. That’s something somewhat positive. But what in the Sam Hill is this?

A Republican lawmaker is demanding to know why the Biden administration appears to be limiting the ability of doctors to order early treatment medications for COVID-19 patients.

Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) on Monday sent a letter to Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra inquiring about a recent change in HHS policy that limits orders and shipments of monoclonal antibody treatments to HHS-approved administration sites.

“As you know, antibody treatments such as bamlanivimab, bamlanivimab/etesevimab, and casirivimab/imdevimab were approved under Emergency Use Authorizations (EUA) and have been shown to be effective in treating COVID-19 patients,” Roy wrote to Becerra.

“Providers across the country, including providers in Texas, have utilized these treatments, aiding in effective treatment of COVID-19 patients. Unfortunately, numerous doctors and healthcare professionals who serve COVID-19 patients are reportedly being denied or limited orders for these treatments by HHS,” he wrote.

Monoclonal antibody (mAb) therapy is a treatment for COVID-19 that studies have shown is effective at reducing the risk of hospitalization and death for patients with mild to moderate illness who receive early treatment. The Food and Drug Administration has granted emergency use authorization for mAb therapies to treat mild to moderate COVID-19 in adults and children older than 12, and the treatment has been promoted across the ideological spectrum by figures like Dr. Anthony Fauci and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.

On Sept. 3, HHS announced that because of a “substantial surge” in the demand for and use of mAb treatments, the federal government would make changes to “help promote optimal and equitable use of the available supply of monoclonal antibodies.”

HHS acted to temporarily limit immediate orders and shipment of mAb treatments “only to administration sites with HHSProtect accounts and current utilization reporting.” The agency also announced that it would review “all orders” by doctors for “alignment with utilization.”

Roy wrote that these changes appear “appeared to have an immediate effect on the ability to expeditiously care for and treat COVID-19 patients.”

Is there a shortage of monoclonal antibodies out there? It doesn’t appear that way, but then there’s this…

The increase in usage of monoclonal antibodies has caused federal officials to place new limits on how much of them Alabama will get.

We’ve learned that state health officials and legislators are fighting to make sure the state gets as much as it needs.

The interesting twist is that there is no shortage of monoclonal antibodies of any kind nationwide.

As of this week, the more than 200 providers offering monoclonal antibodies will see a roughly 30 percent reduction in what they requested.

The south is reportedly receiving the lion’s share of the COVID treatment, and there’s a reason for that.

“In states like Alabama where vaccination rates have been low, we’ve seen some people touting those as something you can do so you don’t have to get vaccinated and that’s a very unfortunate situation,” said state health officer Dr. Scott Harris.

Dr. Harris explains that up until now, providers could request however much they wanted.

“It’s a little hard to understand their explanation because there’s not actually a product shortage.”

State legislators including Senator Tuberville and other health officials including former Surgeon General Regina Benjamin are advocating for regular allocation.

“We don’t need to stockpile it, we need to treat people,” said Dr. Benjamin.

This seems to be a regional thing. Florida, Alabama, Texas and Tennessee look like they’re the biggest places where a ramping-up of demand for monoclonal antibodies is kicking in, and particularly in Florida and Texas they’ve set up sites where folks can come in and get those treatments.

And all of a sudden, amid what we’re told is no national supply issue, they’re cutting everyone back to 70 percent of demand. They’re now rationing a treatment that works.

And they’re doing it in red states with Republican governors.

Is this a partisan thing?

Vaccination rates in the southeast are pretty low, mostly because there are two groups of people who are most vaccine-reticent.

First is black people, who lead the league in refusing the jab. That’s something Biden and his allies in the legacy media don’t want to talk about, but it’s the truth. Second is conservatives who don’t trust the vaccine.

Interestingly, as a percentage of the population people with advanced degrees are perhaps the least likely to take the jab, including a whole lot of doctors and nurses. Why do you think that is?

It probably has something to do with the fact that by a traditional definition of a vaccine, the COVID vaccine doesn’t really qualify.

That’s not a particular criticism of its usefulness. For people susceptible to serious problems with COVID, the vaccine is a wise idea.

But a vaccine is supposed to prevent the vaccinated from getting or spreading a given disease. And that isn’t what’s going on here. What it’s doing is reducing symptoms and helping people who might otherwise have a problem from getting really sick. That’s not what we generally refer to as a “vaccine;” it’s what we would call a “treatment.”

You’re not supposed to say this, of course. In fact, when Alex Berenson, who has been one of the loudest and most persistent critics of the medical establishment’s flip-floppy careenings on COVID, said it two weeks ago he was banned from Twitter.

A month ago Berenson was on the radio with Clay Travis and Buck Sexton and all but predicted he’d get banned. In the segment he talked about the vaccinated people in the hospital in Israel, for example.

So if the vaccines don’t particularly stop the spread of the virus, and if more and more people get it who’ve been vaccinated start showing symptoms, and you start seeing more and more calls for people to take the jab a third time for a booster shot…if Berenson is right, then at some point we’re back to natural immunity, right?

And if we get back to natural immunity as the way to beat COVID, then what you want is treatment. You want people to beat the virus, get natural immunity from having beaten it, and hopefully they’ll have beaten it without suffering too much.

That sounds like a job for monoclonal antibodies…which we’re now rationing.

Chip Roy is right to raise hell about this. What it looks like is that the Biden administration is so torqued up about vaccinating everybody, and in fact they’re so fanatical on that score that they’re ignoring the fact that 58 percent of the public say they don’t have constitutional authority to mandate vaccinations like they’re trying to do (68 percent of independent voters, by the way, reject Biden’s vaxx mandates), that they’re withholding treatments that work.

Which is a monstrous accusation to make. It brings us no pleasure to make it. But the fact is that these people no longer get the benefit of the doubt. Not Biden, not Fauci. None of them. And when they do things which look suspicious we should be suspicious of them.

If monoclonal antibodies work to keep people from being seriously sick with COVID, then the administration needs to be doing everything it can to insure there is at least as large a supply of them as there is of the vaccines. That’s clearly not happening; in fact, it looks like the opposite is happening, and it’s happening at the same time that they’re cracking down all over the country on the use of antivirals which have shown at least some efficacy in tamping down COVID symptoms.

We’ve said that this is the first disease in human history nobody seems to want to cure. That isn’t quite right, because there are people who clearly want to cure it. But it doesn’t seem like any of them work in the Biden administration.

They don’t want you cured of COVID. They want you vaccinated against it. Even if that doesn’t mean you’re safe.

You’re not crazy if that makes you more than a little unimpressed.