The President’s Latest Silver Bullet
With hydroxychloroquine a bust and vaccines not coming until after the election, President Donald Trump is touting a new silver bullet against COVID-19: monoclonal antibodies. “They call them therapeutic, but to me it wasn’t therapeutic,” he said in a video he tweeted on Wednesday, five days after receiving the experimental treatment from the biotech company Regeneron. He claimed that he felt better immediately. “I call that a cure,” he said. “It’s a cure,” he said again, defying whoever might have told him to please just say “therapeutic” instead.
from small studies suggest that monoclonal antibodies, which are lab-grown versions of antibodies the immune system naturally makes to fight pathogens,. “No one ever got the drugs he got before, in the sequence he got them,” says Myron Cohen, an infectious-disease researcher at the University of North Carolina who is studying monoclonal antibodies in clinical trials against COVID-19.
