Gates Package — page 994

If you're infected with COVID and get mAbs at the right time (and if they're adapted for the variant you have), they reduce the risk that you'll end up in the hospital by at least 70 percent.7 I had high hopes for mAbs in the early days of COVID--so much so that the Gates Foundation paid to have up to 3 million doses set aside for high-risk patients in poor countries. But we soon learned that mAbs weren't going to be a game changer for COVID: The Beta variant of the virus, which was especially prevalent in Africa, had changed its shape enough that the antibodies we had supported no longer grabbed onto it enough to help. We could have started over to develop another mAb that would have been effective for the new variant, but manufacturing them takes three to four months, which makes it hard to keep up with a virus that evolves as quickly as COVID does. In the future, there may be better ways of manufacturing mAbs that reduce this lead time, or ways to pick mAbs that grab onto a piece of the virus that is unlikely to change. Other downsides became clear as wealthier countries tried to roll out mAbs treatments. COVID antibodies were expensive to make, they had to be administered at facilities capable of infusing them into your blood, and they helped only those patients who could be identified early in the course of the disease. The lack of infusion centers was a particularly big problem in developing countries. As of [XX date], mAbs are estimated to have saved [XX lives]--a significant number, but not the big breakthrough we had hoped for. Because of these problems, we wrote off our investment in mAbs and increased our focus on antiviral drugs--particularly the ones that patients could take orally rather than requiring an infusion.. As soon as COVID was identified, many researchers started looking for the holy grail of treatments: an antiviral drug that's cheap, easy to administer, effective for different variants, and