According to a document from the Department of Health and Human Services, a total of 108 doses of Regeneron’s monoclonal antibody cocktail have been allocated to Washington, which had 265 new coronavirus cases on Wednesday alone. Somehow Rudy Giuliani, Donald Trump’s lawyer, got one of those doses. In an interview with a New York radio station on Tuesday, Giuliani did us all the favor of explaining why he qualified for privileged treatment.
“I had very mild symptoms,” he told the radio station, WABC. “I think if it wasn’t me, I wouldn’t have been put in the hospital. Sometimes when you’re a celebrity, they’re worried if something happens to you; they’re going to examine it more carefully and do everything right.”
Trump himself was among the very first people to get the Regeneron treatment outside of a clinical trial, before it received an emergency use authorization from the FDA on Nov. 21.
Giuliani, of course, is not the only presidential crony to get access to highly rationed experimental therapies.
In October, Chris Christie, the former New Jersey governor and an informal adviser to the president, got a different monoclonal antibody treatment, one produced by Eli Lilly. Housing Secretary Ben Carson wrote on Facebook that Trump “cleared” him to receive monoclonal antibody therapy when he was hospitalized with COVID-19 last month.
Some of these men received their treatments before they were available to the public. Giuliani may have got his instead of a member of the public. His case sheds light on two kinds of corruption. There’s the corruption of an administration that appears to be using government power to procure potentially lifesaving favors for the president’s friends. And there’s the corruption of a for-profit medical system in which VIP patients can receive extraordinary levels of care, sometimes at the expense of the less connected.
Right now, the criteria for distributing these drugs can be murky. Hospitals try to come up with ethical triage frameworks, but Robert Klitzman, co-founder of the Center for Bioethics at Columbia, said there are often workaround for VIPs. Often, he said, when these millionaires and billionaires ask hospital administrators for special treatment for a friend, “hospitals do it.”
Why? “Hospitals have huge financial problems, especially at the moment with COVID,” he said. They “need money that is given philanthropically from potential donors.”
In other words, Giuliani was right: Celebrities have access to better care than ordinary people.
But like so many in Trump’s orbit, Giuliani combines unusual candor with unusual deceptiveness. He’s honest about trading on his fame, but uses his ultra-elite experience to play down the dangers of COVID for everyone. “If you get early treatment nothing’s going to happen to you,” he said on WABC, adding, “You totally eliminate the chance of dying.”
This is wildly untrue.
“This message that’s been delivered, that maybe we don’t need to be so worried about COVID, that has been a deadly message,” said Shoa Clarke, a cardiologist and professor at Stanford University School of Medicine.
When I spoke to him on Wednesday, he’d just learned that one of the hospitals in his area had reached capacity. “We’re expecting the others to follow suit in the next few weeks, to the point where we don’t have ICU beds available anymore,” he said.
But don’t worry. If friends of Trump need one, they’ll surely find a way.
The New York Times