It’s a pandemic miracle: I’m defending the FDA against Ron DeSantis

This helps explain what we’ve seen with omicron. Because this variant has so many mutations, people who have been vaccinated, or survived an earlier covid infection, have defenses that don’t prevent infection as well as they used to. But we might still have some antibodies that are effective, and a battery of other immune defenses that also kick in, so the infections still tend to be milder. Many monoclonal antibodies, by contrast, have lost some or all of their effectiveness — so much, in the two that were just withdrawn, as to render them basically ineffective.