We don’t know for sure that Donald Trump was the 79-year-old obese man who got special access to a weight-loss drug after a secret application from someone at the NIH. But the signs point strongly in his direction. If he is the one, the signs also suggest his health is much worse than what he and the White House want us to know.
In case you missed it, Stat recently reported that drug-maker Eli Lilly and Trump’s FDA allowed just one 79-year-man to get the drug, retatrutide, in April. The 80-year-old Trump was 79 in April. After the story was published, White House spokesperson Kush Desai wrote on Xitter, “this application was not for the President.” Which is not a denial that the drug was for Trump.
“It’s not clear why the patient couldn’t enroll in Lilly’s ongoing clinical trials of the drug,” Stat noted. “In interviews, 18 bioethics experts, obesity clinicians, and current and former government health officials told STAT that the application struck them as unusual. One after another, they questioned why Lilly would offer compassionate use — also known as expanded access — for a single patient when obesity is such a widespread condition.”
Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-NH) is demanding answers. In a letter to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., she wrote that it appears “you may be bending the rules of a federal program, and exerting improper political pressure, in order to provide a well-connected individual with free access to an exclusive prescription drug.” This, as “the Trump Administration has driven prescription drug costs for Americans through the roof.” She wants to know who received the drug as well as the process and communications that led to access.
During Hassan’s appearance on MS Now Wednesday night, cohost Luke Russert played what he called an “interesting” clip from Trump’s Tuesday rally, the same day the Stat article was published. In it Trump spoke about a “friend” taking “the fat drug.”
TRUMP: Who takes the fat drug? A friend of mine looks extremely fat, sloppy, but very brilliant. He's a brilliant businessman, but he's a slob. There's no question about it, a very neurotic person, which you need sometimes to be successful, but he said, "President, I just came over here and I bought - I won't say it was [Ozempic] or whatever the hell it was, but I bought the fat drug.” I said, “I didn't know you use it because it's not working.”
Yeah, asking for a friend, right?
According to Stat, the retatrutide was requested for a patient who had already been treated with another obesity drug but had only received “moderate weight loss.”
This episode also raises more questions about Donald Trump’s health. Stat said the drug was requested to treat a patient for “refractory obesity with obstructive sleep apnea and pulmonary hypertension, a severe version of the disease. Pulmonary hypertension is high blood pressure in the lungs, which can be life-threatening.” Bariatric surgery was not recommended because of the patient’s age and other health conditions.
I report, you decide!
