Unsanitized: Late-Night Infomercial Trump Hawking Unapproved COVID Treatment

Plus, Trump backs out of the next debate. This is The COVID-19 Daily Report for October 8, 2020.

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First Response

The President, now reduced to being a quarantine vlogger with 26 days until the election, gave another update in front of the White House yesterday, and he actually managed to break a little news in this. At around 2:15 in, he starts talking about the companies in the final stages of coronavirus vaccines, and that we’ll have them “very very shortly. I think we should have them before the election, but frankly the politics gets involved and that’s OK, they want to play their games, it’s going to be right after the election.”

That’s the first time that I can remember that Trump has admitted the reality of the timeline—at least in the way that he admits anything—and that a vaccine will not be the October surprise. He blamed politics but it’s clearly due to the FDA safety guidelines requiring Phase 3 trial participants to be observed for two months before seeking emergency approval. The White House tried to block release of those guidelines but the FDA got them out anyway, and that’s informing Trump’s sudden acknowledgement.

However, always the salesman, Trump is now on to the next thing, and if he loses the election he surely has a future alongside Montel Williams and Cher in the lucrative infomercial space. This is an actual transcript:

“I wasn’t feeling so hot, and within a very short period of time they gave me Regeneron, it’s called Regeneron. And it was like unbelievable. I felt good immediately, I felt as good three days ago as I do now!... I know they call them therapeutic, but to me, this wasn’t just therapeutic, it just made me better. I call that a cure. That’s much more important to me than the vaccine.”

Regeneron is not an approved drug, it’s still in clinical trials, and in fact it’s not a drug at all because Regeneron is the name of the manufacturer, not the drug. It’s more of a drug cocktail that synthetically mimics antibodies produced in the human body. It doesn’t work overnight, as Trump claimed.

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Much of the video is devoted to Trump getting the drug from Regeneron, and another from Eli Lilly, approved for emergency use. “We’re trying to get them on an emergency basis… I have emergency use authorization all set, and we’ve got to get it signed now,” he said.

In fact, Regeneron just filed an application for emergency use authorization of its drug cocktail with the FDA on Wednesday. The infomercial president was pleading on behalf of a drug manufacturer, pressuring the scientists to approve the medication based on personal anecdote. Trump promises “hundreds of thousands” of doses set to go, although the company only says they have 50,000 available.

Trump has taken about umpteen drugs (we don’t know how many because he had the doctors sign NDAs) during his course of treatment at Walter Reed, which would have cost a non-president somewhere around $100,000. so why he fixated on the one from Regeneron is unclear. To be fair he did also mention a treatment from Eli Lilly, which the company says has performed well in tests. It is true that Trump used to own stock in Regeneron as of 2017. But it was a relatively small amount and that was three years ago.

Regeneron has also received $500 million in federal dollars to develop these treatments. The stock soared in after-hours trading once Trump’s video was released. Trump said he would work it so the drug would be released “for free,” and if that’s true there’s no real reason for the stock to go up. But nobody really believes Trump these days, least of all investors who know how the pharmaceutical system works.

More likely, this was a quintessentially Trumpian display of misdirection. The hopes of a pre-election vaccine announcement have been cut off, so now we have some therapeutics, which are “like a cure” in the Trump mind, that he can peddle to the public. If the Regeneron and Lilly drugs are cures then the coronavirus is solved, according to Trump, and most importantly, he solved it. So he’s pressuring the FDA to get it out so he can announce the cure to great fanfare.

At any rate, there’s no doubt that we’re not far removed from Trump hawking reverse mortgages.

Mr. President, You’re Muted

Speaking of Trump, his campaign is not excited about videoconferencing technology, apparently. The Commission on Presidential Debates announced that the town hall-style matchup between Trump and Joe Biden scheduled for next week would be virtual. I was looking forward to it, because the most patient man in media, C-SPAN’s Steve Scully, was set to host, and I was hoping he wouldn’t call the candidates by name but as “Republican, Line 1” and “Democrat, Line 2.”

But it doesn’t look right now like there will be a debate. Immediately Trump told Fox News that he wouldn’t “waste my time” with it, and then his campaign followed up with a similar statement. Campaign manager Bill Stepien said that Trump “will have posted multiple negative tests prior to the debate,” making there no need to change the format. Trump hasn’t even disclosed when he tested negative before contracting the virus, so going on their word is suspect.

I guess that since Trump’s only go-to debate move is to interrupt and talk over everybody, and you can’t do that remotely, he’s going to back out. Either that or it would be unmanly to submit to the Commission on Presidential Debates’ wishes. At any rate, I’m going to have an early night next week. And that’s what matters in the end.

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