In a tale of two COVIDs, two presidents’ contrasting experiences illustrate the moonshot-caliber medical achievements that let many patients be treated at home instead of in an ICU
Donald Trump may have been more ill than anyone suspected when he checked in at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center on October 2, 2020. The then president, 74 years old at the time, had serious signs of disease in his lungs and low blood oxygen levels. He was quickly started on an aggressive course of treatments, including an intravenous infusion of the antiviral medication remdesivir and a cocktail of monoclonal antibodies.
“The differences in both the disease course and treatment for COVID in Trump versus Biden is stark,” says Akiko Iwasaki, an immunologist at Yale University, who has worked on vaccine development. It may be obvious to all, but it bears repeating that the most striking difference is that Trump was infected with the virus that causes COVID just before the vaccines against it were available.
The differing courses of the illness among these two men demonstrates the goal of the vaccines’ accelerated development efforts. “It’s a great illustration of exactly what the vaccines are supposed to do,” says Edy Kim, a critical care physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. Kim has seen a marked reduction in patients hospitalized with COVID and an even greater decline in such patients moving into the intensive care unit.
Just last week the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that, for healthy adults age 50 and older, a second booster prevented hospitalizations caused by the Omicron variant and its subvariants in 80 percent of people, compared with 55 percent in those who only had one booster.