In defiance of the Biden administration, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis purchased monoclonal antibody treatments this week to circumvent the federal restriction on shipments to states with higher needs.

Speaking at a news conference in Tampa on Thursday, the governor said that Florida will receive approximately 3,000 doses of the GlaxoSmithKline antibody treatment product, sutrovimab. The product will serve as a supplement for shortages in the Regeneron supply for the state of Florida, which will receive a shipment of 18,000 treatments from the federal government this month, according to NBC Miami.

DeSantis said of the treatments:

It’s clearly saving lives. It’s clearly keeping people out of the hospital. But it’s also something that, even short of being hospitalized, this is something that can really knock you on your rump for a week or two … it assists in the recovery. People get better much quicker if they get this treatment.

As Breitbart News reported last Thursday, the Biden administration last week:

…began to cut the distribution of monoclonal antibodies to red states, such as Florida and Alabama, contending those states, including Texas, Mississippi, Tennessee, Georgia, and Louisiana, are comprising too big a share of the supply in recent weeks — 70 percent.

In response to criticism and backlash, the White House press secretary said the Biden administration’s policy was to make the distribution of monoclonal antibodies more “equitable.”

During his press conference on Thursday, DeSantis rebuked the Biden administration for denying life-saving treatments to people in his state:

We should be doing everything we can to get them the treatment, not cut the treatment. So the fact that the Biden administration is doing this, I just think it’s wrong. The implications I think are going to be negative, we may have less access, we may have to close sites, the hospitals may not have all that they need. So this is fundamentally wrong.

When announcing his plan to circumvent the Biden administration last week, DeSantis touted the GlaxoSmithKline treatment for reportedly having a stronger efficacy than the Regeneron treatment.

“The clinical data on that was even better than the clinical data on Regeneron – 85%  reduction in hospitalizations,” he said. “It is not approved for subcutaneous injections, so if we get it, and we use it at our sites, we have to expand the amount of IV treatments that are available, which we are going to be willing to do.”