White House Denies Trump Got Unapproved Obesity Drug

The White House aggressively denied a report that implied President Trump may have received the investigational obesity medication retatrutide.

STAT on Tuesday reported that Eli Lilly and the FDA granted one request for compassionate use of the triple hormone receptor agonist in April to a 79-year-old patient (Trump turned 80 on June 14). A senior NIH clinician requested it for a patient with “refractory” obesity, obstructive sleep apnea, and pulmonary hypertension, according to the story.

The patient in question reportedly had been treated with the GLP-1 medication tirzepatide (Zepbound) for a year but only had moderate weight loss. The NIH clinician recommended against bariatric surgery because of the patient’s age and comorbidities.

The request drew interest from top officials, suggesting the patient was well connected, STAT reported.

STAT‘s story makes it clear that it does not know who the patient is, but the news outlet reached out to the White House given the patient’s demographics: Trump has a body mass index bordering on the obesity range, and the president earlier this year said he “probably should” be taking a GLP-1 drug.

Initially, the White House did not directly answer STAT‘s question about whether the patient was Trump. White House spokesperson Kush Desai directed STAT‘s inquiry to HHS, but did respond to a question about the patient’s obstructive sleep apnea and pulmonary hypertension: Desai said Trump’s recent medical evaluation “covers this,” though that memo does not mention either condition.

After the story published, 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 did not return a request for comment from MedPage Today as of press time.

It’s unusual to have compassionate use access to a weight-loss drug given the wide availability of options, STAT noted, adding that it could find no examples of previous compassionate use programs for the popular obesity drugs tirzepatide and semaglutide (Wegovy). Patients often struggle to access approved GLP-1 drugs given their high costs.

Also, drugmakers are supposed to publicly announce compassionate use programs, usually through a press release or a post on their website, STAT reported. But Eli Lilly’s only public acknowledgement of the retatrutide compassionate use program is a thin post on ClinicalTrials.gov, which doesn’t specify conditions of the program or how a patient might qualify. That post says the program was first submitted on June 1.

Retatrutide is an investigational triple hormone receptor agonist, targeting GLP-1, GIP, and glucagon. Patients with obesity lost an average of 28.3% of their body weight with the highest dose of the drug in the TRIUMPH-1 trial, which is close to the 30% average seen with bariatric surgery.

People have already been trying to garner access to retatrutide, even though it is not FDA approved. MedPage Today previously reported on the case of a patient who had extreme side effects stemming from intractable diarrhea after obtaining the drug online.