‘The minute I took the cocktail I felt 100% better’
10 Dec 2020
The Guardian – Rudy Giuliani, the public leader of a quixotic effort by Donald Trump to overturn the 2020 presidential election, was released from hospital on Wednesday evening after being treated for Covid-19.
Giuliani received “exactly the same” treatment that Trump received during his own hospitalization in October, the former New York mayor said, apparently including a drug cocktail of monoclonal antibodies that few patients have access to.
“His doctor sent me here; he talked me into it,” Giuliani said of the president in an interview with a local New York radio station. “The minute I took the cocktail yesterday, I felt 100% better. It works very quickly, wow.”
Giuliani, 76, was admitted to Georgetown University hospital in Washington DC on Monday.
“My treatment by the nurses and staff at Georgetown Med Star hospital was miraculous,” the former New York mayor tweeted on Thursday. “I walked in with serious symptoms. I walked out better than ever.”
That account echoed the experiences of other members of Trump’s inner circle who have fallen grievously ill with coronavirus and been treated with monoclonal antibodies, synthetically manufactured proteins that mimic the immune system’s ability to fight off viruses.
But almost no one has access to the treatments in question: a cocktail manufactured by Regeneron and a similar treatment made by Eli Lilly.
The health secretary, Alex Azar, said on Wednesday that a total of 278,000 doses of the two therapies had been distributed in past months. Some states use a lottery system to allocate the drugs, while others rank patients by eligibility, the New York Times reported … Read more.
