Eric Trump on Sunday touted a nonexistent “vaccine” that he claimed dramatically helped his father, President Donald Trump, recover from COVID-19 after the president “worked” hard to get it developed.
The president didn’t get a vaccine, nor has he developed one, nor is it clear he’s recovered.
In fact, doctors administered a steroid, an antiviral drug and an antibody cocktail to the president after he tested positive for COVID-19. There is no authorised COVID-19 vaccine in the US.
Never miss a thing. Sign up to HuffPost Australia’s weekly newsletter for the latest news, exclusives and guides to achieving the good life.
None of the facts apparently mattered to Eric Trump. “My father literally started day one creating this vaccine. He worked to push this vaccine, and now my father just took it, and you see how well he got over it,” Eric Trump gushed on ABC News’ “This Week.”
“Wait, wait,” host Jon Karl interrupted. “Can you clarify that you said your father just took a vaccine?”
Eric Trump responded, “Meaning when he was in Walter Reed [medical center] — the medicines that he was taking.”
Karl tried to clarify. “The therapeutics?”
Trump didn’t respond — nor did he amend his statement but continued to tout his father’s improving health.
The president received the corticosteroid dexamethasone, the antiviral drug remdesivir and an experimental antibody therapy created by Regeneron.
Unlike his son, Trump hasn’t claimed he was given a vaccine. But the president has declared that he is “cured” and insisted in a tweet Sunday without any medical evidence that he is now “immune” to COVID-19. The immune tweet was flagged by Twitter for violating its rules against “misleading and potentially harmful information related to COVID-19.”
Leonard Schleifer, the CEO of Regeneron, on Sunday dismissed Trump’s comments and the president’s earlier praise of treatments as “miracles coming down from God.”
Trump’s treatment with the company’s experimental antibody cocktail is “a case of one,” said Schleifer, who’s a member of the Trump National Golf Club in Briarcliff Manor, New York, where he and the president have reportedly discussed the company’s drugs.
Schleifer said ongoing clinical trials still need to prove how effective the treatment is. The antibody cocktail has so far only been given to 10 people outside of clinical trials.
“The president’s case is a case of one, and that’s what we call a case report. It is evidence of what’s happening, but it’s kind of the weakest evidence that you can get,” Schleifer told “Face the Nation” on CBS.
“The real evidence ... about how good a drug is and what it will do on average has to come from these large clinical trials, these randomized clinical trials, which are the gold standard,” he added.
Trump’s physician, Sean Conley, said in an unsigned statement Saturday that the president no longer poses a risk of transmitting COVID-19 to others. But Conley did not reveal if Trump has tested negative for COVID-19.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends that people with serious cases may need to isolate for 20 days. Saturday will mark only the 10th day since the onset of Trump’s COVID-19 symptoms, Conley noted in his memo.
Experts have said that it’s impossible to know yet if Trump no longer poses a risk to others.
“At this point, there’s no diagnostic test that tells you whether a person that’s infected remains infectious,” said Benjamin Pinsky, who leads Stanford University’s virology labs. “There is absolutely a chain of unknowns.”
The White House has been extraordinarily tight-lipped about the exact nature of Trump’s illness and recovery. He plans to resume his campaign rallies this week.