A senior NIH clinician filed an unusual request with the FDA in April, seeking compassionate use access to Retatrutide, an experimental Eli Lilly obesity drug currently unavailable to the public, on behalf of an unnamed 79-year-old patient. The conditions listed were refractory obesity, obstructive sleep apnea and pulmonary hypertension.
STAT News published a report about it on Tuesday, and the White House spent the afternoon calling the reporter a gossip columnist rather than issuing a denial.
Compassionate use is a program reserved for patients with serious or life-threatening conditions, and the doctors and public health policymakers STAT spoke to could not recall a single prior instance of it being invoked for obesity alone.
“It’s like saying we have all these people who need to get from New York to D.C., and rather than chartering a bus, we’re going to tell everyone that they need to drive their own car,” one expert said of approving the waiver for exactly one person.
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The case had attracted the attention of senior health officials, who suggested the patient carried considerable influence, and the circumstantial details that followed did not exactly point away from the obvious candidate. The patient was 79 in April, the same age Trump was before he turned 80 on June 14. Eli Lilly CEO David Ricks has a well-documented relationship with Trump and attended a dinner at Mar-a-Lago earlier this year. These details are all, technically, coincidences.
STAT contacted the White House before publishing, and the response amounted to a careful exercise in saying nothing useful. The Department of Health and Human Services offered: “The FDA supports expanded access programs that can provide patients with serious or life-threatening conditions access to investigational treatments when no comparable or satisfying approved therapies are available.” Kush Desai referred STAT to HHS, HHS pointed back to its statement, and neither confirmed nor denied the report.
Once it did, Desai found his voice. “Because this has to be spelled out for @LizzyLaw_, who has proven herself to be an unserious gossip columnist, this application was not for the President,” he posted on X.
STAT reporter Lizzy Lawrence replied with the obvious: “Thank you for clarifying. I asked you, the FDA, and HHS multiple times yesterday whether this application was for the President. No one answered my question directly.”
Desai responded: “We shouldn’t have to bat down baseless speculation for you to not print it. Any reporter with standards would understand this.” TNR contributor Nina Burleigh observed: “If you don’t want to do your job, maybe stop taking taxpayer funds…”
The denial that eventually arrived did not address the conditions listed in the application, which is the part of the story that carries the most weight. Refractory obesity, obstructive sleep apnea and pulmonary hypertension appear nowhere in Trump’s May 29 Walter Reed medical report.
When STAT asked Desai whether Trump suffers from those conditions, he said the White House medical memo “covers this,” a claim that falls apart on reading, since none of the three conditions appear anywhere in the May 29 Walter Reed report. The unnamed patient had also previously taken tirzepatide for at least a year without significant results, and tirzepatide is equally absent from Trump’s medical documentation.
Featured image via Political Tribune Gallery
