Donald Trump will spend the next few days in a military hospital on the outskirts of Washington. (Proceedings)
Washington:
US President Donald Trump will spend the next few days in a military hospital outside Washington to undergo treatment for Covid-19 after receiving an experimental and unproven treatment, White House officials said Friday.
The announcements raised concerns about the severity of the president’s illness after his chief of staff told reporters that Trump had only mild symptoms.
“On the recommendation of his physician and medical experts, the President will work in the presidential offices of Walter Reed for the next few days,” said press secretary Kayleigh McEnany.
While still in the White House, Trump, 74, received a single dose of Regeneron’s antibody cocktail, according to a letter from White House physician Sean Conley.
– Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 2, 2020
The treatment is undergoing clinical trials, but has not yet received any kind of regulatory approval.
“It is being evaluated by a team of experts and together we will make recommendations to the president and the first lady regarding the next best steps,” Conley said.
Trump, who has repeatedly questioned the severity of the pandemic, first announced in an overnight tweet that he and first lady Melania Trump, 50, had tested positive and were in quarantine.
Trump’s medical team’s decision to place him on the untested drug was met with deep skepticism by some experts.
“We should not give the president this drug until it is proven to work,” tweeted ER Physician Jeremy Faust, an instructor at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.
“It’s bad science, bad medicine, and bad ethics to give unproven things to powerful people that you don’t give to average people,” added Vinay Prasad, associate professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco.
But Leonard Schleifer, Regeneron’s chief executive, told the New York Times: “All we can say is that they asked to be able to use it, and we were happy to accommodate them.”
He added that the president was not the first patient to receive a so-called “compassionate use” exemption, but “when he is the president of the United States, of course, what he gets obviously gets our attention.”
Promising initial results
Earlier this week, Regeneron announced the results of one of its early-stage trials that showed its drug, which is infused intravenously, reduces viral load and recovery time in outpatients with Covid-19.
The US biotech company is simultaneously running late-stage trials for hospitalized patients with Covid-19 and for the drug’s potential use as a prophylactic.
Antibodies are infection-fighting proteins produced by the immune system that can bind to particular structures on the surface of pathogens and prevent them from invading cells.
Vaccines work by teaching the body to make its own antibodies, while scientists are also testing antibodies made from the blood of recovered patients, called convalescent plasma.
But it is not possible to make a mass treatment of convalescent plasma.
Researchers can also examine the antibodies produced by recovered patients and select the most effective among thousands, and then manufacture them at scale.
Regeneron’s experimental drug Covid-19, called REGN-COV2, is a combination of two antibodies, called a “cocktail.”
The idea is that it will have a better chance of working if the virus mutates to evade the blocking action of a single antibody.
Last year, a triple antibody cocktail developed by Regeneron was shown to be effective against the Ebola virus.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is posted from a syndicated feed.)
.
