Americans for Limited Government is campaigning for support for a legislation that prevents the Biden administration from withholding life saving COVID treatment from hundreds of thousands of Americans who need it.
A non-profit organization geared to downsizing "the size and scope of government" and expanding "individual freedom," the organization is pushing the Treatment Restoration for Emergency Antibody Therapeutics (TREAT) Act, which was authored by several Republican senators.
According to Breitbart, the TREAT Act, which was being led by Republican Senators Marco Rubio and Rick Scott among others, seeks to hinder the Biden administration from politicizing lifesaving treatment for COVID. The legislation bans the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) from "implementing policies that restrict hospitals and other appropriate healthcare providers from ordering and receiving COVID-19 monoclonal antibody (mAb) treatments directly from manufacturers and distributors."
This comes just after President Joe Biden decided to restrict the supply of monoclonal antibody treatments due to an alleged "substantial surge in the utilization" associated with treating patients afflicted with COVID's highly contagious delta variant, Yahoo! News reported.
Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan even demanded that Biden "explain the sudden rationing of these life-saving treatments, without any warning, after the administration urged us to promote them."
Republican leaders are hoping that the TREAT Act will prevent the government from further restricting lifesaving treatment. Americans for Limited Government has long been supporting the legislation even before it was introduced.
In an op-ed for Townhall last month, Americans for Limited Government President Rick Manning argued that the Biden administration's attempt at rationing such lifesaving treatment is "a direct attempt to get America to accept the federal government as having legitimacy in getting between the patient and the doctor and determining treatment protocols."
The nonprofit also through a letter called upon senators to join the movement and "take a stand against Biden's Covid treatment rationing," claiming that the "federal government mustn't play politics with patients' lives based on blue state and red state rivalries." They argued that the Biden administration must "facilitate access and distribution of medical and pharmaceutical supplies amid the Covid pandemic," no matter if it is medical supplies or COVID treatments.
Sen. Rubio of Florida felt particularly attacked by the Biden administration's rationing of the lifesaving treatment for COVID, saying that it was an "abrupt change" and "an attempt to punish Florida," which received only half of shipments following President Biden's mandate. Sen. Rubio said it was a "vindictive, politically motivated [action]" by the Democratic leader to "jeopardize the health and safety of Floridians and others," Florida Politics reported.
Just recently, the World Health Organization (WHO) updated its guidelines on monoclonal antibodies as a treatment for COVID, Medical News Today reported. The updated guidelines showed how WHO "conditionally recommend the use of monoclonal antibodies'' in treating COVID patients with non-severe disease but have the highest risk for hospitalization, as well as patients who have severe or critical illness who have failed to build an antibody response to COVID.
The new guideline is based on a meta-analysis of several studies and trials, one of which showed that treatment with casirivimab and imdevimab, which are monoclonal antibody treatments, dramatically reduced hospitalization among COVID patients by up to 71%.