“I was fighting for my life,” Toma Dean tells Inside Edition, adding that her symptoms are improving after treatment. Meanwhile, the FDA is warning Americans not to take the anti-parasitic drug, ivermectin, after it was falsely touted as a COVID-19 cure.
A Florida woman seen in a viral photo lying on the floor of her local library as she waited to receive monoclonal antibody treatment is speaking out to Inside Edition. Toma Dean went to the makeshift COVID-19 treatment clinic in Jacksonville after her condition took a turn for the worse.
“I was fighting for my life,” Dean said.
Dean has been battling COVID-19 for two weeks. She says she had just come from the ER where a doctor told her that Regeneron was her best chance at beating the virus. She was waiting for her turn for the treatment, when she said she simply couldn’t stand any longer.
“I knew that if i didn't lay there on that floor, that I was not gonna make it to the treatment and that was my last chance before someone possibly put me on a ventilator,” Dean said.
After receiving the treatment, her symptoms started to improve.
“This morning I woke up, and I thought, I actually can walk more than five feet without screaming and telling my family I'm running out of air,” Dean said.
Regeneron is proving to be an effective drug against COVID-19.
Meanwhile, the FDA is warning people not to take another drug that has been touted by unreliable sources as a cure. The anti-parasitic medication ivermectin is commonly used as a dewormer for cows and horses.
“You are not a horse. You are not a cow,” the FDA wrote on Twitter today. “Seriously, y’all. Stop it.”
In Mississippi, 70% of the calls to the state’s poison control hotline are from ingesting ivermectin.
On Monday, the FDA granted full approval to the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine for people 16 years and older. It is hoped that the eagerly-awaited decision will ease vaccine hesitancy. More than 80 million eligible Americans remain unvaccinated.
