It turns out that when the president of the United States contracts a virus that has killed more than a million people worldwide, more than 200,000 people in the United States alone, he can receive special treatment. Literally.
The debacle of President Trump’s COVID diagnosis and a cascade of revelations that various Republican elected officials and potential supporters who attended the events contracted coronavirus is a fast-paced story. The president’s own physician, Dr. Sean Conley, delivered a news conference Saturday morning that raised more questions than he answered about Trump’s health after he was airlifted to Walter Reed Medical Center on Friday.
The timeline Conley provided did not match what the White House had previously said, and he later provided a statement saying it was wrong. According to the most recent information, Trump was diagnosed Thursday and did not begin receiving Regeneron’s experimental COVID drug, a cocktail of antibodies, until Friday.
Additionally, you are receiving remdesivir from Gilead, which has obtained emergency clearance from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for some of the sickest COVID patients and is an experimental antiviral that has been developed to combat infectious diseases for a longer time. . for a decade (and has already been used in many patients). On Sunday, it was revealed that he is also taking dexamethasone, a decades-old steroid that targets inflammation and is typically used in patients with severe COVID-19 cases.
Trump’s access to the experimental Regeneron drug cocktail, a more exclusive treatment without the emergency designation, says a lot about the state of drug regulation. The treatment, like Eli Lilly’s similar therapy, could receive an emergency clearance from the FDA in the future, although it has not done so to date.
How exactly did you get it then? Trump has always been an advocate for “right-to-try” drug laws, in which ill patients can receive unapproved therapies if there is simply no other option.
But what happened here is different. The FDA directly authorized the president to obtain the drug Regeneron under the agency’s expanded access program.
“The right to try is similar to expanded access, however the main difference is that the FDA use permit is not required,” as one industry group explains.
The CEO of the company, Leonard Schleifer, said so in an interview with the New York Times.
Extended access is not exclusive to the president. Thousands of patients with debilitating diseases who lack available treatment options use this process each year. But in this case, it appears that Trump had a straight line toward that access, plus some of the best medical care in the country.
