ATHENS – A former deputy health minister for the now major opposition SYRIZA who threatened consequences if a friend of his with COVID-19 didn’t get preferential treatment for antibodies got what he wanted.

The provocative Pavlos Polakis, a heavy-smoking anti-vaxxer surgeon forced by party leader Alexis Tsipras to take the COVID-19 shots warned that “all hell with break loose,” if the treatment wasn’t approved – and it was.

In a long tirade on Facebook, Polakis accused health officials of a “disgraceful” protocol he said excluded eligible patients, especially his 76-year-old friend on the island of Rhodes who wasn’t named.

Polakis gave the New Democracy government until New Year’s Day to give the special treatment to his friend or there would be consequences he didn’t specify but that won’t be needed.

Health Minister Thanos Plevris said decisions on who gets monoclonal antibodies among COVID-19 patients are made by an an expert panel of infectious disease experts without inteference but that it was approved for Polakis’s friend, said Kathimerini, although he didn’t say why.

“There is no room for interventions, bullying or friendly relations in the administration of monoclonal antibody treatments,” he said. “These would be the criteria if Polakis was still a minister,” he said.

Monoclonal antibodies are proteins made in a lab that mimic the immune system’s ability to fight the coronavirus and are administered to high-risk COVID patients who are especially susceptible, the paper said.

The intravenous treatment must be administered in hospitals under medical supervision and its aim is to prevent the disease from becoming even more acute in critically ill patients.