'Can You Give Us A Good Reason?': Tuberville Grills Becerra On Monoclonal Antibodies

morning gentlemen good morning morning sir good to see y'all secretary becerra i've been here a lot of course people alabama and all across the country everybody's ready to get back to normal life i know you are too specifically our teachers i'm hearing from a lot of teachers we've been in full class most of the last year and a half in alabama but teachers are concerned they're concerned that they know they're going to get exposed there's no way around it but they want to know that they've got an effective means once they get sick uh example i had a teacher write me a letter but she got sick and she goes to the hospital uh real sick but they turned her back because there's no monoclonal antibodies alabama hospitals have had a a pretty good supply over the last couple of uh i said four or five months of the antibodies secretary baser why did the hhs take over the supply chain of monoclonal antibodies just in the last few months can you give us good reason senator thank you for the question and i'm glad you asked because this is something on the minds of a lot of folks we have seen a tremendous increase in the demand for these monoclonal antibodies let me give you an example in your state of alabama in july your state ordered all those providers ordered a total of 6 800 doses in august your state ordered over 45 000 doses in less than two months it went up that quickly and your state wasn't the only one the difficulty is that with the the that immediate surge trying to meet that demand became complicated so what we've done is we have surged with that to make sure that we're manufacturing more we're working with industry to make sure that they continue to manufacture more but what we thought was important is to make sure that every state alabama as any other state had access to those monoclonal antibodies so what we did is rather than let those therapies be secured on site by anybody on site we decided to let the states decide how to best coordinate that so that state would make sure alabama would make sure that every alabama would have access to those monoclonal antibodies not just that one place in one part of alabama and so the formula for that distribution is public your staff and you have that and so we would ask you to take a look because what we're trying to do is have transparency guide how we make sure those therapies and those treatments are available to all yeah it's my understanding in the second quarter this past year that we had a huge contract with two companies with monoclonal antibodies and when they're ready to deliver we said we don't need them this was in april and i just want to know who in the world would turn those down in this time of need it doesn't make sense now they came back and gave us a lot of them because we went back to them the companies and they said well luckily we've held some of them but then we had to crank it back up who would make that decision well so remember the the request for the the use of the monoclonal antibodies was coming from the places at home in your state uh and we were making sure that we were making uh providing the the distribution to make it possible to do that and so we were meeting the needs until these last few months when the delta variant really surged and all of a sudden a lot of people were getting sick especially in certain states by the way seven states are right now essentially uh taking in about 70 of all those monoclonal antibodies of the 50 states seven states and so you can see the surge has occurred quickly and what we're trying to do is make sure that the manufacturers are producing the supply that's needed we're trying to make sure that the distribution is done fairly equitably and it's done transparently and that there's accountability as well because we don't want to find it an alabama goes without that monoclonal antibody because somebody else got it and shouldn't have yeah and you know we're we're so fired up about the vaccine and i am too i've taken it and it's not going to keep you from getting the most time it's going to keep you from getting real sick and i think everybody can agree with that but we need to focus more on therapeutics i i don't think there's any doubt about and testing i've talked a lot of doctors especially in the school systems we need to be testing almost every day or every few days kids before they come now they can have the virus if we wait till they get symptoms they've had it for two days and they've already been in school and it's it's been exposed i just want i just hope you know i heard you say about equity and i continue to hear everybody talk about equity and i believe in that but we need to save people's lives we can't shut down alabama or some of these other states simply for the fact that we might not be taking as many vaccines we cannot let people die and especially teachers uh you know we're telling them to go back to school and they want to go teach but we can't do that so i would i'd hope that we would uh not get political with this uh red states blue states it shouldn't be about that it should be about everybody if they need it they get it and uh we just need to be more prepared so absolutely sector conor i got some questions for you and i'm gonna i'm gonna uh uh put it on record uh miss madam madam chair but thank you very good answers thank you and look forward to hearing from you thank you thank you thank you very much senator lujan

Channel: Forbes Breaking News

Views: 133,951

Keywords: Sen. Tommy Tuberville, Sec. Xavier Becerra, monoclonal antibodies

Id: JJCkeXMYx5Q

Length: 5min 31sec (331 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 30 2021