Yet another disgusting scandal to put on top of the mountain of scandals during the Trump administration:
Hospitals around the country are carefully rationing the treatments for COVID-19 that have been given to President Trump and those in his inner circle, which remain in very short supply as case counts in the U.S. continue to climb.
Rudy Giuliani said this week that he received the monoclonal antibody treatment manufactured by Regeneron after President Trump ordered his doctor to help the former New York City mayor. After leaving the hospital on Wednesday, Giuliani thanked the physician, Dr. Sean Conley, and credited it with helping him.
But Giuliani isn’t the only one in Trump’s orbit to have gotten the rare treatment. Ben Carson, secretary of housing and urban development, wrote on Facebook last month that, after having been “desperately ill,” Trump “cleared” him for the “monoclonal antibody therapy,” which he said “saved my life.”
And Chris Christie, hospitalized with COVID-19 in October, refused to participate in a trial of a Regeneron treatment out of concern that he would get a placebo, and instead gained access to a drug based on a similar technology manufactured by Eli Lilly.
All received monoclonal antibody treatments manufactured either by Regeneron or Eli Lilly, a scarce and expensive-to-manufacture medicine that has been found to stave off serious disease in early-stage COVID-19 sufferers.
And while Trump and his inner circle have managed to get potentially life-saving doses, the treatment remains extremely hard for most patients to gain access to. Hospitals are rationing the medicines, with some openly admitting that there’s just not enough for those who need the treatment to receive it.
In Utah and Massachusetts, for example, patients need to win a lottery to get the treatment. In Seattle, it’s being given via experimental trials because of the scarcity…
It remains unclear how Giuliani got access to the drug in the face of that massive scarcity. According to HHS statistics, D.C. is being allocated only 108 doses of Regeneron’s treatment per week.
Eric Topol, a cardiologist and professor of molecular medicine at the Scripps Research Institute in San Diego, told TPM that hospitals in that city had just started using the treatment on Thursday.
“The total number of doses that are allocated for California — 5,728 — that’s around how many people there are in that risk category getting sick every day here,” he said.
TPM found that various hospitals around the country are rationing the medicine, which the FDA recommends be used for people 65 and older, with a BMI of 35 and above. The New York Times reported that some FDA officials are concerned about how people connected to Trump have managed to get access to the treatments.
[…]
The FDA says that it takes over an hour to inject the monoclonal antibodies via an IV hookup.
“The facilities are not well set up yet,” Topol said, adding that areas which were hard-hit are finding difficulty making the space to feed the treatment to patients intravenously.
He added that he was baffled that those in Trump’s inner circle appear to have received the treatment.
“They have been superspreaders, denounced the public health mitigation strategies, and they are the few people getting this treatment, and they’re bragging about how it saved their lives,” Topol said. “In my view, its reprehensible — it’s bad enough that they got special treatment, but then they have to brag about it.”
That’s just how they roll. And, for some reason, many average people who couldn’t get that treatment in a million years are happy to let their Dear Leaders have privileges they could never have. It’s what some people call populaism, which I will never understand.