But why not leave them on the market for people who have other variants? Well, omicron is now estimated to account for 99.9 percent of new cases. With those case rates, we’d need to pump a thousand doses into covid patients’ arms — at thousands of dollars a pop — in order to potentially help maybe one. And even that one wouldn’t necessarily benefit. Most people recover from covid without monoclonal antibodies, and some people don’t even if they get them.

All treatments have side effects, including allergic reactions. So the FDA tends to balk if you have to treat a large number of patients, most of whom might recover without treatment, to potentially help one. And that was true long before covid-19.

None of this was remotely controversial before the DeSantis administration attacked the FDA. It was widely agreed that many previously effective monoclonals were now of little use against omicron. In the case of the withdrawn treatments, even the manufacturers, Eli Lilly and Regeneron, agree they don’t work. No sane governor should want to waste money and scarce medical resources on pumping useless antibodies into Floridian veins.

Of course, DeSantis is not insane; he is a shrewd political operator who is eyeing a presidential run in 2024. He has clearly decided that one way he can outflank former president Donald Trump with the Republican base is to appeal to vaccine skeptics, many of whom embraced antibodies enthusiastically. That might be one reason DeSantis made these drugs a centerpiece of Florida’s pandemic strategy — and why he is now manufacturing a controversy out of a completely unremarkable, and eminently defensible, decision by the FDA.