In the reporter’s fantasy version of how the world works a journalist writes a story, the governor reads it, calls the White House, and solves the problem. Never happens. Except maybe it did over this past weekend.
In this week’s Maine Sunday Telegram I broke a story on how a massive backlog in the certification of positive Covid test results by Maine authorities had resulted in Maine getting a much smaller share of a scarce lifesaving treatment for the disease, because it artificially lowered the state’s 7-day new case rate. The next day, Governor Janet Mills’s office announced they had called the White House over the weekend to alert them to the problem and the state would be receiving nearly a double ration of the monoclonal antibody.
It’s not clear if the extra treatments from the US Department of Health and Human Services were a one-off thing or will persist in weeks going forward.