Covid-recovering top drugs -- mainly just helped Trump friends

[uk666]

Covid-recovering top drugs -- mainly just helped Trump friends

When President Donald Trump emerged from a three-night hospital stay for his coronavirus infection, he made a vow in a videotaped on the White House South Lawn.

"I want everybody to be given the same treatment as your president because I feel great. I feel, like, perfect," Trump said. "I think this was a blessing from God that I caught it. This was a blessing in disguise."

Two months later, Trump has helped some people receive the experimental treatments his doctors administered him while ill: his close friends and associates, many of whom contracted the virus while ignoring recommendations to mitigate its spread.

The presidential involvement has not extended to millions of other Americans who contracted the virus as well, straining hospitals and requiring health professionals to decide who can receive the most promising treatments, supplies of which are severely limited.

While Trump has pressed the US Food and Drug Administration to approve the treatments quickly, he has not yet ensured that "everybody" can receive them for free. 

As he remains consumed by his election loss, the President has barely mentioned the surge in cases, and did not comment on Wednesday when the US death toll reached its highest daily count.

He's been more active when people he knows get sick.

Trump personally intervened to Ben Carson received the same monoclonal antibody therapy that he did during his stay at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center.

The President's White House doctor was also dispatched to convince Rudy Giuliani to enter the hospital when he fell ill with the virus last week. When he did, he, too, was administered the drug cocktail the President has credited with saving his life.

Another of Trump's close allies, former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, also received an experimental antibody treatment ahead of its emergency use authorization by the FDA.

All four men -- Trump, Carson, Giuliani and Christie -- fall within high-risk categories for people more likely to suffer severe symptoms of Covid-19. And all have at times ignored recommendations on masks and social distancing that Trump himself has downplayed as the pandemic ravages the country.

"It's wrong. It's flat-out wrong, it's unethical and it shouldn't be going on," said Art Caplan, the founding head of the Division of Medical Ethics at New York University School of Medicine. "We could make the case the President is an essential worker and we'll bump him or her up to the top of some list. 

But when you have people rationing scarce drugs, antibodies, when you have people rationing beds in certain places around the country -- and that's going to continue -- being a celebrity shouldn't count. Being a highly visible politician shouldn't count. It shouldn't count who you're connected to. What should count is need."

Like Trump, who received the Regeneron antibody cocktail while at Walter Reed, his associates received drugs that aren't yet widely available to the American public, despite the President's vow to make them free to anybody who needs them.

That has left health officials in states with the task of deciding who can receive the treatments that, by his own admission, saved Trump's life and likely helped his close associates recover.