US President Donald Trump will spend the coming days in a military hospital just outside Washington to undergo treatment for Covid-19 after he received an experimental and unproven treatment, White House officials said Friday.
The announcements raised concern about the severity of the president’s illness, after his chief of staff had earlier told reporters that Trump had only mild symptoms, AFP reports.
“At the recommendation of his physician and medical experts, the president will be working from the presidential offices at Walter Reed for the next few days,” press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said.
While still at the White House, Trump, 74, received a single dose of Regeneron’s antibody cocktail, according to a letter issued by White House physician Sean Conley.
The treatment is undergoing clinical trials but hasn’t yet received any form of regulatory approval.
“He’s being evaluated by a team of experts, and together we’ll be making recommendations to the president and first lady in regards to next best steps,” Conley said.
Trump — who has repeatedly cast doubt on the seriousness of the pandemic — first announced in an overnight tweet that he and First Lady Melania Trump, 50, had tested positive and were going into quarantine.
The decision by Trump’s medical team to place him on the unproven medicine was met with deep skepticism by some experts.
“We shouldn’t be giving the president this medication until it’s been proven to work,” tweeted emergency medicine physician Jeremy Faust, an instructor at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.
“It is 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, an associate professor of Medicine at the University of California San Francisco.
But Leonard Schleifer, Regeneron’s CEO, told the New York Times: “All we can say is that they asked to be able to use it, and we were happy to oblige.”
He added that the president was not the first patient to be granted a so-called “compassionate use” exemption but “when it’s the president of the United States, of course, that gets — obviously — gets our attention.”
