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UPMC officials announced Tuesday that the hospital will soon offer monoclonal antibody therapy as a preventive against COVID-19, but stressed that the vaccination remains the best way to protect against the virus.
The hospital will continue to offer the antibodies as a lifesaving treatment for patients who test positive, officials said during a virtual news conference. Now though, through an emergency use authorization from the Food and Drug Administration, they will have the ability to use those antibodies to treat at-risk patients who have been exposed to the virus.
People 12 and up exposed to coronavirus or at high risk of institutional exposure and not fully vaccinated or people with compromised immune systems are eligible for REGEN-COV antibodies under the emergency use authorization, officials said.
UPMC has provided the preventive treatment to 14 patients, according to Erin McCreary, an infectious disease pharmacist, and the hospital will soon make it available throughout its system.
The preventive use of antibodies builds on UPMC's 3,448 antibody treatments over the last nine months for COVID-19 patients who have already tested positive, treatments that reduced the risk of hospitalization and death by 60 percent, based on early data, McCreary said.
Preventive antibody treatment is not a substitute for vaccination.
"Vaccination remains the most important way to protect yourself and your loved ones," McCreary said.
All three vaccines available to Americans, while not necessarily "perfect," nevertheless do "exceptionally well at preventing complications like hospitalization and death," said Graham Snyder, UPMC medical director of infection prevention.
While still under their own emergency use authorizations, the vaccines are not experimental, having successfully negotiated initial trials and having been administered hundreds of millions of times since those authorizations were granted, Snyder said.
"Without question" people who haven't availed themselves of vaccinations, no matter what their age or health status, are in "greater danger to themselves and those around them," Snyder said.
Vaccinations are the "cornerstone to blunting the impact of the virus in our communities," Snyder said.
Despite the current predominance of the more transmissible Delta variant, the number of COVID-19 patients in UPMC hospitals is only one-tenth of the 1,200 at the height of the pandemic in December, according to information provided by Snyder.
Even though vaccines have been remarkably successful, UPMC has not mandated them for its employees.
"Our approach is to build trust among health workers and the communities we serve," Snyder said. "Educate people about the safety and efficacy of the vaccines and dispel myths."
It's important to understand and appreciate why some people want to postpone or avoid getting vaccinated, and it's important that those people hear the arguments in favor of vaccination from those in their own communities, Snyder said.
Taking the wrong approach could end up exacerbating health disparities, he said.
Seventy percent of its health workers got shots, Snyder said.
Adjustments may be needed, however, he conceded.
"A lot is still on the table as this pandemic evolves," Snyder said.
Mandates, like some other health care organizations have imposed, are not inconceivable, eventually, he said.
"We'll be watching to see how expansive the pandemic is," he said.
Additional mutations of the virus are inevitable, and some of those mutations could increase transmissibility further or increase severity or refocus the virus' attack on other parts of the body, Snyder said.
In addition to vaccinations and antibody therapy, there are the older, still reliable, tools of masking, distancing, testing and tracing, which remain critical in controlling the spread of the virus, Snyder said.
Mirror Staff Writer William Kibler is at 814-949-7038.