Trump Calls Unapproved Drug a 'Cure' for His COVID

President says it was 'blessing from God' he got virus
By Jenn Gidman,  Newser Staff
Posted Oct 8, 2020 7:57 AM CDT
Trump Calls Getting Virus a 'Blessing From God'
President Trump in his latest video.   (Twitter)

Just hours before Mike Pence defended the Trump administration's response to COVID-19 at the vice presidential debate, President Trump shared a video containing a direct message from him to the public on the virus. "I think this was a blessing from God that I caught it," the president said in the 5-minute video, which showed him in front of the White House, per the New York Times. In the video, Trump explained how he "wasn't feeling so hot" when he first entered Walter Reed hospital last week. But doctors then gave him an experimental antibody cocktail from Regeneron, which he noted made him feel "great" and "perfect." "To me it wasn't therapeutic. It just made me better, OK? I call that a cure," he said of the still-not-FDA-approved drug, which he said everyone should be able to get for free.

The Times notes Regeneron's impact on Trump's condition remains unknown—he's also taking the antiviral drug remdesivir and the steroid dexamethasone—as does whether he has completely recovered. Meanwhile, Regeneron on Wednesday said it had put in an application with the FDA to get emergency approval for its antibody cocktail, per the Times. The company notes it would initially have doses ready for about 50,000 patients—not the "hundreds of thousands" of doses Trump mentioned in his video. Although preliminary results on the cocktail look promising, it hasn't completed clinical trials. Yahoo reports that Joe Biden, when asked by reporters what he thought about Trump calling his illness a "blessing," responded, "I'm going to think before I speak. I think it's a tragedy the president deals with COVID like it is something not to be worried about when already 210,000 people have died." (More President Trump stories.)

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