“In my opinion, being hospitalized is a marker of the severity of the disease. I don’t have any details of the severity of the president’s condition, but when I hear that someone is hospitalized with Covid-19, that’s an indication that they have a more severe case,” said Ben-Aderet. “There is no benefit to being in the hospital otherwise.”
Regeneron Pharmaceuticals Inc.’s experimental antibody cocktail was given to Trump before he flew to Walter Reed. The infusion is a combination of man-made antibodies that the human immune system normally produces to fight off infection.
In the first detailed study of the compound, disclosed by Regeneron Tuesday, patients who produced high levels of their own antibodies had their symptoms ease within a week, while those who didn’t make their own had symptoms for an average of almost two weeks. The drug yielded the most improvement in people who didn’t produce their own vigorous antibody response.
The compound is still experimental, however, and some doctors speculated that its use by Trump may indicate his condition is worse than disclosed. Unapproved drugs are given on a compassionate-use basis when the potential benefits are significant and the patient is willing to accept the unknown risks.
“I’m very concerned about the president’s team giving him an unvetted, untested treatment,” said Jeremy Faust, an emergency medicine doctor at Brigham & Women’s Hospital in Boston and editor of Brief19, a daily roundup of news on SARS-CoV-2 and Covid-19 research. “This has not been shown to work in clinical trials.”
Faust said he was concerned that the move to give Trump the Regeneron drug reflected desperation.