I see the US government has ended Eli Lilly's trial of monoclonal antibody for hospitalized patients. Early statistics prove it doesn't work. I'm sure the same use of Regeneron's MAB therapy will have the same problem. The reason is simple: It does no good to beat a dead horse, or in this case a dead virus.

The people designing these trials are ignoring all the work that shows the virus is declining because of innate immune system attack by the time people have symptoms bad enough to be hospitalized. They may not have any "live" virus left by then! The symptoms are all about the immune system over-reacting to the dead virus fragments still in the body. That's the cytokine storm. At that point, the only therapy useful is steroids and anticoagulants.

Lilly is continuing some trials of using their MAB early, before symptoms appear. And preliminary stats show that has promise. If you stop viral replication, that's less dead virus fragments the immune system will have to over-stimulate it.

The big problem is that you have to give people without symptoms MAB, or indeed any anti-viral. The only way you even know they are infected, is to test every day with Dr. Mina's $1 spit test strips. If you catch an infection on the first day of contagion, an antiviral would help. But of course, most of those people will have asymptomatic infections or mild cases so they don't really need a $30,000 MAB or $3000 remdesivir. Maybe the antiviral you should give them is $1 worth of ivermectin?

I think MABs are only useful at this point to give Covid health care workers temporary passive immunity. But that would cost about $120K per worker per year.