‘It is very personal’: AbCellera’s COVID-19 treatment is saving lives in the U.S. In Canada, it’s sitting in storage. Now the company’s CEO is speaking out

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Carl Hansen calls Canada’s reluctance to deploy the company’s COVID\u002D19 treatment \u0027absolutely appalling and inexcusable\u0027

an agreement to purchase up to 26,000 doses. Canada has requested and received 17,000 of those doses or about US$21.3 million so far.distributing bamlanivimab alone last week, as some COVID-19 variants have proved resistant to it, the FDA has already given emergency approval to a new treatment combining bamlanivimab with another antibody, etesvimab. Eli Lilly said it has submitted the combination to Health Canada, which has not yet issued a decision.

That high wore off the next month when Dalal’s father contracted the virus in the weeks leading up to the company’s IPO. When Dalal called his father’s general practitioner to ask about getting him the AbCellera therapy, he was met with confusion. The doctor “wasn’t even aware that there was a treatment like that which was available,” Dalal said. He called government agencies every few days, trying to secure a dose for his father. He was repeatedly told it wasn’t available.

Among them, Nunavut’s government decided the risk of using the treatment outweighed the benefit, a spokesperson wrote in an email. No one in Newfoundland and Labrador “will receive [bamlanivimab] as a therapy until more evidence is derived to support the drug’s efficacy,” said a spokesperson for that province.

One big reason for caution from the provinces and territories may be a January report from the Canadian Agency for Drugs and Technologies in Health . The country’s governments created the body in 1989 to provide “health care decision-makers with objective evidence to help make informed decisions about the optimal use of” drugs and other health technologies.

 

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Tough call. Meant for those with mild symptoms but high risk. Those people aren’t in hospital for covid yet, but it’s given in hospital. I guess they could stock it in LTC homes

Where’s the study, criminal negligence is heavy words with a link to data, I realize he was emotional but now he is calm down where’s the beef

Was the study large enough to conclude one in 52 was conclusive for vs risks? Need more info because if it’s safe and the benifits away the risks great all in, but where’s the reason

Criminal

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