Rudy Giuliani, the former mayor of New York City and the personal lawyer for President Donald Trump, openly bragged during a radio interview this week that he received specialized medical care for his coronavirus diagnosis, and that his “celebrity” status helped secure him the exceptional treatment.
While speaking in an interview with WABC, Giuliani said that he was treated with at least two of the same drugs that Trump received in early October, when the president was hospitalized for COVID-19 at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center.
“If it wasn’t me, I wouldn’t have been put in a hospital frankly,” Giuliani candidly said during the interview. “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.”
Giuliani left the hospital on Wednesday evening, four days after he was admitted for care after his COVID-19 diagnosis.
Guiliani is the latest member of Trump’s inner-circle who was infected with COVID-19 and received medical treatment that lies out of reach of the average coronavirus patient. Besides Giuliani and Trump, former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and current Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson, both Trump loyalists, also received the same special concoction of medicines that appears to help treat the virus.
The two types of treatments given to Trump and his allies include “a monoclonal antibody developed by Eli Lilly and a cocktail of two monoclonal antibodies developed by Regeneron,” according to reporting from The New York Times. The treatment plans received emergency use authorization (EUA) from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) last month to be used for patients with “mild to moderate” symptoms but who are at high risk.
However, as new daily cases of the virus continue to increase at an alarming rate, the EUA treatment plan offered to Trump and his allies is becoming less accessible for the average person. In some cases, hospitals have had to resort to a lottery system to determine which patients can receive them.
Trump has used his personalized and specialized treatment for COVID-19 to tell the public that it shouldn’t worry about contracting the virus. After receiving his world-class care at Walter Reed two months ago, Trump shared a video on social media telling Americans to overcome their fears about coronavirus.
“Don’t let [coronavirus] dominate you. Don’t be afraid of it. You’re going to beat it,” Trump said.
The following day, Trump shared a tweet about his hospital stay, inappropriately comparing coronavirus to the flu (even though in private he has admitted that COVID-19 is deadlier than influenza).
“Many people every year, sometimes over 100,000, and despite the Vaccine, die from the Flu,” Trump wrote in his highly misleading tweet, which Twitter put a fact-check on. “Are we going to close down our Country? No, we have learned to live with it, just like we are learning to live with Covid, in most populations far less lethal!!!”
Since October 5, when Trump said that patients across the U.S. were going to “beat” coronavirus, more than 78,000 have died from the virus. As of December 9, nearly 290,000 Americans have died from COVID-19, with the past seven days seeing 2,288 deaths per day, on average — a rate that is more than three times higher than the average at the time when Trump shared a video telling people not to fear the virus.
We’re not backing down in the face of Trump’s threats.
As Donald Trump is inaugurated a second time, independent media organizations are faced with urgent mandates: Tell the truth more loudly than ever before. Do that work even as our standard modes of distribution (such as social media platforms) are being manipulated and curtailed by forces of fascist repression and ruthless capitalism. Do that work even as journalism and journalists face targeted attacks, including from the government itself. And do that work in community, never forgetting that we’re not shouting into a faceless void – we’re reaching out to real people amid a life-threatening political climate.
Our task is formidable, and it requires us to ground ourselves in our principles, remind ourselves of our utility, dig in and commit.
As a dizzying number of corporate news organizations – either through need or greed – rush to implement new ways to further monetize their content, and others acquiesce to Trump’s wishes, now is a time for movement media-makers to double down on community-first models.
At Truthout, we are reaffirming our commitments on this front: We won’t run ads or have a paywall because we believe that everyone should have access to information, and that access should exist without barriers and free of distractions from craven corporate interests. We recognize the implications for democracy when information-seekers click a link only to find the article trapped behind a paywall or buried on a page with dozens of invasive ads. The laws of capitalism dictate an unending increase in monetization, and much of the media simply follows those laws. Truthout and many of our peers are dedicating ourselves to following other paths – a commitment which feels vital in a moment when corporations are evermore overtly embedded in government.
Over 80 percent of Truthout‘s funding comes from small individual donations from our community of readers, and the remaining 20 percent comes from a handful of social justice-oriented foundations. Over a third of our total budget is supported by recurring monthly donors, many of whom give because they want to help us keep Truthout barrier-free for everyone.
You can help by giving today. Whether you can make a small monthly donation or a larger gift, Truthout only works with your support.