President Donald Trump has received top-notch care in his personal fight against the coronavirus, including treatment available to basically no one else in the country.
He has at least 13 doctors attending to him. He took a helicopter to the hospital. He received oxygen, steroids and an experimental antibody treatment that fewer than 10 other people have received outside of a clinical trial.
Trump was also able to return home because he can receive monitoring and care at the White House ― a luxury nearly no one else can afford. (Medical experts said it was still ill-advised for Trump to leave Walter Reed medical center while he was still sick and contagious.)
For anyone who isn’t president, this care would cost more than $100,000.
Yet all this care and treatment was not what Trump was telling the American public to do to ward off COVID-19.
He received the best. Everyone else deserves bleach.
No, seriously. In April, Trump floated drinking disinfectants as a coronavirus cure.
“I see the disinfectant where it knocks it out in a minute — one minute — and is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside, or almost a cleaning?” he said at the time. “Because, you see, it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs, so it would be interesting to check that.”
He did not “check that” on himself. There’s no indication that Trump consumed any cleaning products to clean out his body.
One of the main cures Trump has pushed is hydroxychloroquine, a drug used to treat malaria. On March 21, he said it had “a real chance to be one of the biggest game-changers in the history of medicine.”
“What do you have to lose?” he added in April.
When Trump started his crusade, hydroxychloroquine hadn’t been fully tested, and medical experts were uncomfortable with his remarks making it seem like the drug was safe for treating COVID-19. His administration even used its regulatory power to make it easier for patients to receive the drug ― as more and more evidence piled up that it was ineffective and perhaps even dangerous.
Trump said he took hydroxychloroquine for two weeks in May as preventative treatment, but he did not take it again once actually diagnosed with COVID-19. On Monday, Dr. Sean Conley, the White House physician, confirmed that it has not been part of the president’s treatment.
REPORTER: Why did you decide not to use, administer, hydroxychloroquine to the president during his time here?
CONLEY: I’m not going to go into all of our debates about specific medicines and therapies, there are dozens of therapies that we were made aware of that we considered that we discussed and debated and looked at, you know, the existing literature on, um, and this is the regimen we chose.
Trump has also touted the benefits of sunlight and warm weather, two other “cures” he does not appear to be relying on for his own health.
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