Democrats Press Trump Admin on Special Access to Obesity Drug

Democratic lawmakers are pressing the Trump administration to disclose who received special access to Eli Lilly’s investigational obesity drug retatrutide.

Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-N.H.) sent a letter to HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. asking who the lone patient was, after STAT reported earlier this week that a request for compassionate use was made to the FDA in April for a “well connected” 79-year-old man with refractory obesity, obstructive sleep apnea, and pulmonary hypertension.

“Was it President Trump who received free Expanded Access to Retatrutide?” Hassan wrote in the letter. “If not, was it a senior Administration official, a political donor, or someone close to the Administration?”

Hassan also asked if the drug was provided for free, and who at HHS approved the request.

During a press briefing on Wednesday, Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.) suggested that Trump canceled the signing of a bipartisan housing bill because he might be having “side effects” from a drug.

“Did Donald Trump get this special drug from Eli Lilly and did he get it under that provision?” Lieu asked. “If he did, why is that the case? The White House needs to come clean and tell the American people about Donald Trump’s health.”

The FDA describes expanded access programs, which allow for early access to investigational drugs, as being for life-threatening conditions and appropriate for scenarios where “there is no comparable or satisfactory alternative therapy” and when trial enrollment isn’t feasible. The agency recently greenlit one such program for the investigational pancreatic cancer drug daraxonrasib.

STAT‘s initial report noted that the application for compassionate use was filed by a senior clinician at the NIH. That clinician said the patient had “refractory” obesity after having only moderate weight loss after being on tirzepatide (Zepbound) for a year.

STAT continues to report that it does not know who the patient is, but given the unusual nature of the application and the patient’s characteristics, it asked the White House if the patient was Trump, who turned 80 earlier this month.

Although it first gave only vague answers to STAT‘s questions, after the story was published, it aggressively denied that Trump was the patient who received the drug under compassionate use.

White House spokesperson Kush Desai lashed out at STAT‘s reporter Lizzy Lawrence in a post on X: “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.”

Lawrence thanked Desai for clarifying and noted that neither he, nor the FDA, nor HHS responded to her previous queries about the application.

“We shouldn’t have to bat down baseless speculation for you to not print it. Any reporter with standards would understand this,” Desai wrote in another post on X. “Are you going to now go ask this idiotic question to the ~4 million Americans in this age cohort and then speculate about them being the application?”

HHS still has not returned a request for comment from MedPage Today.

Trump has past experience with the FDA’s compassionate use pathway. When he developed COVID in October 2020, he was given Regeneron’s then-investigational monoclonal antibody via compassionate use.