We now know, via Rudy G. himself, how much he owes to President Trump for his lux COVID-19 treatment.
“Dr. Trump, he was very confident in it,” Rudy Giuliani said in an appearance on his video podcast, Common Sense, released Friday, referring to the scarce and experimental treatment that he received.
Days after being released from Georgetown University hospital, Giuliani provided on the podcast more detail than he has before about his velvet-rope COVID treatment. Special attention from the White House and access to rare, newly developed treatments spirited Giuliani from precipitously declining oxygen levels to health in a matter of days.
Giuliani said that he had gotten the medicine, a monoclonal antibody treatment manufactured by Regeneron, out of an exception “if you’re willing to take whatever risk there is, which I was willing to take because Dr. [Sean] Conley had used it for President Trump.”
“I took that along with the flu shot and some other medicines,” Giuliani added. “And I must say I recovered.”
But even though Conley – and an assortment of rare medicines – get the practical credit for Giuliani’s treatment, he assigned the real cause for his cure to President Trump.
Giuliani’s comments provide some access to the strange world in which President Trump can dispense medical care as a benefit to those in his inner circle, and receive fealty as a response.
The former New York City mayor went further than he previously has in claiming that White House doctors were responsible for his care.
“Dr. Sean Conley, the White House physician, oversaw it,” Giuliani said.
“[He] kept in touch, made sure everything went right, gave me a lot of good advice.”
The former New York City mayor said that he fell ill on Dec. 3.
Giuliani said that while he was a “big believer” in “early detection” of the “CCP virus,” among other ailments, but that this time he declined to get tested after first experiencing symptoms.
“I probably did have symptoms for a few days – I was traveling very fast and going to one state after another testifying in hearings concerning the election, I had gone in five days to four states,” Giuliani said. “Really stressful hearings – some people were threatened, this whole anti-Trump thing has become a horrible sickness eating away at the souls of many people.”
But it wasn’t until he got home and spoke with his girlfriend Maria Ryan, a nurse practitioner and New Hampshire hospital CEO, that he found out he had the virus.
“She noticed that I looked a little pale,” Giuliani said, before telling him that he had symptoms of COVID after noticing that his blood oxygen levels were dangerously low.
“She got my son on the phone, and he said the same. Finally she got Dr. Conley on the phone from the White House who I’ve gotten to know working with President Trump,” Giuliani said. “And the combination of three doctors, Dr. Ryan, Dr. Conley, and now Dr. Giuliani, who took over my care, got me to go to the hospital.”
Giuliani later added, without elaborating, that his time at the hospital began with a “substantial” emergency operation. Doctors found that he had “COVID pneumonia,” and administered oxygen to him, along with remdesivir (“the new medicine that’s been developed within the last, less than a year, for dealing with the viral load of CCP virus”), four days of the steroid Dexmethasone (“I probably have more energy now than when I went in”), and Regeneron, the much sought-after monoclonal antibody treatment.
“Doctors thought it was almost miraculous how fast I recovered,” Giuliani said. “From the first day even to the second day, there was remarkable recovery.”
The former New York City mayor added that his son, Andrew, took over his role on litigation filed by the state of Texas in the Supreme Court as he convalesced. The Supreme Court declined to hear the case on Friday.
