Trump seen politicizing another treatment
After months of touting coronavirus vaccines that would land before Election Day, President Donald Trump made an abrupt pivot this week to a promising but unproven therapy that he received as part of his treatment for COVID-19.
Trump claimed on videos posted Wednesday and Thursday on Twitter that the drug he received, a cocktail of laboratorymade antibodies from Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, is a “cure” that would soon be broadly available — even as the company disclosed that in the next few months, it would have enough supply to treat only the number of Americans sickened in the last week, or about 300,000 doses.
A similar antibody drug, made by Eli Lilly & Co., shows similar promise but also will be in short supply, with about 1 million doses by year’s end.
Trump also claimed in the video he had granted the drugs an emergency use authorization, a designation that would make the medicines more broadly available. But the companies said they have submitted the requests to the Food and Drug Administration.
“We’re going to make them available immediately; we have an emergency use authorization that I want to get signed immediately,” Trump said in the video posted Thursday afternoon.
Experts said that by inserting himself and his own recovery story into an area of ongoing medical research, Trump risks disappointing and confusing the public with a hopeful anecdote that may not reflect how the drug works for others or how broadly it will become available when it’s approved.
He also promised it would be free.
“The fundamental problem with monoclonal antibodies is there’s not enough worldwide capacity to produce enough of them to have a real impact on the disease,” said Ezekiel Emanuel, a health policy expert who’s advising the campaign of Joe Biden. “Yes, they might be great, but for a small number of patients.”
The president also said in the video that people in hospitals should receive the drugs, but the data so far supports using them in people with mild or moderate illness who are recently diagnosed.
Early data from ongoing studies have shown evidence the drugs reduce symptoms over days, knock back the virus by reducing levels in the body and may cut down the need for further medical visits. That data is considered very promising but not a cure.
Both the Regeneron and Eli Lilly drugs are being tested in clinical trials, and no one knows if the former helped Trump recover, whether it did so in addition to all the other treatments he received or whether he would have recovered on his own as part of the natural course of the disease.
As Trump did with the antimalaria drug hydroxychloroquine and convalescent plasma transfusions, experts said he is overstating the evidence and politicizing medicine.
“The problem is every therapy for coronavirus has become politicized — every single therapy — and that’s the last thing you want in a pandemic, so this is just next in line,” said Walid Gellad, director of the Center for Pharmaceutical Policy and Prescribing at the University of Pittsburgh.
In an interview before Trump’s video was posted, Leonard Schleifer, chief executive of Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, said his company wanted regulators to decide when its drug merits an authorization for emergency use based on the data.
“We are very afraid that this will become a political football, where … if we get an (authorization), people will say we didn’t deserve it and only got it because of political reasons,” Schleifer said. “Or if we don’t get an (authorization), people will say we did deserve it and didn’t get it for political reasons. We don’t want this to be a political decision.”