The Slatest

Trump Does Infomercial for Experimental Coronavirus Drug as Drugmaker Requests Emergency FDA Approval

Dr. Donald Trump says he’s cured! And you could be too! After testing positive for the coronavirus and spending four days in the hospital getting pumped full of an assortment of drug cocktails, Trump is ready to call this thing for his latest miracle cure of choice—an antibody treatment from drugmaker Regeneron. Does it work? Maybe! Who knows! Are there serious side effects? Maybe! Who knows! The treatment may very well work and it may very well be safe, but the company is still testing the treatment in clinical trials, so we don’t really know if it’s either.

The truth of the situation is we don’t really know if the drug even worked on Trump or if it was something else—like the remdesivir or steroid dexamethasone, both of which he was prescribed while at Walter Reed—or just a placebo. But Trump’s got a monorail he’d like to sell you, one that he needs to move before Nov. 3. So he started selling—creepily hard. “I went in and I wasn’t feeling so hot and within a short period of time they gave me Regeneron,” Trump said in the four-minute long video. “And other things too, but I think this was the key. But they gave me Regeneron. And it was, like, unbelievable. I felt good immediately. I felt as good three days ago as I do now.”

“Then, [in] addition to that, you have various other drugs that help a lot,” Trump continued. “I know they call them therapeutic. To me it wasn’t therapeutic, it just made me better. I call that a cure.” A cure, you say? Like a miracle cure? Tell me more. “For me, I walked in I didn’t feel good; a short 24 hours later I was feeling great,” Trump enthused. “That’s what I want for everybody. I want everybody to be given the same treatment as your president. Because I feel great. I feel, like, perfect. So I think this was a blessing from God that I caught it.” The “it” being the coronavirus.

After pushing hydroxychloroquine and then bleach, the president is now all in on “Regeneron,” which is the name of the company not the actual treatment. On the same day that the president went to bat for the unproven drug, Regeneron petitioned the Food and Drug Administration for emergency approval to bring tens of thousands of doses to market. Is that a good idea? It is according to the company’s pitchman. “The FDA is approving things in a matter of weeks that use to take a matter of years,” Trump said. “No president’s ever pushed them like I’ve pushed them either.”