COVID-19 treatments: a look at what President Trump is taking

Last Friday President Trump announced that he and First Lady Melania Trump tested positive for COVID-19. From there it was a whirlwind of sorts, with the president's physician saying he felt 'fatigued,' to the president being admitted to Walter Reed National Medical Center. Over the weekend, doctors made contradictory statements on whether the president had received supplemental oxygen, despite noting that the the president's oxygen levels "dipped." Eventually doctors clarified the president received small amounts of oxygen on a few occasions.

On Monday the president left the hospital and returned to The White House after tweeting:

I will be leaving the Walter Reed Medical Center today at 6:30 P.M. Feeling really good! Don't be afraid of Covid. Don't let it dominate your life. We have developed, under the Trump Administration, some really great drugs & knowledge. I feel better than I did 20 years ago!

Over the course of the president's treatment as he battles COVID-19, he has used more common medications as well as others that are experimental.

Dexamethasone, a common steroid, was given to the president and is known to treat patients with more severe symptoms.

News Channel 3 spoke with local Eisenhower Health Tennit Emergency Department doctor, Dr. Euthym Kontaxis, about some of the different treatments for the virus.

"If you have some respiratory symptoms or evidence for some sort of reaction to the COVID-19, or you may be dropping your oxygen or something like that, we might start Dexamethasone therapy," Dr. Kontaxis said. "If we start it at a low dose it’ll actually prevent progression and sometimes improve the patient significantly."

The president's list of therapeutics also involves antiviral medicine, Remdesivir. The medication is also another commonly used medicine on COVID-19 patients.

"That actually has  been found at least preliminarily to shorten the course of the COVID-19 symptoms. It hasn’t really shown a change in mortality," said Dr. Kontaxis.

On Monday doctors who were in charge of treating the president announced he would receive his 5th and last dose of Remdesivir at The White House on Tuesday.

The medication received Emergency Use Authorization by the Food and Drug Administration on August 28. According to the agency's website:

"[...] the FDA has determined that it is reasonable to believe Veklury [remdesivir) may be effective for the treatment of suspected or laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 in all hospitalized adult and pediatric patients. The Agency’s review has also concluded that the known and potential benefits of Veklury outweigh the known and potential risks for these uses."

"Any medication has some side effects and Remdisivir has been pretty safe. There can be complications with other organs, people can have reactions to it when it’s infused-- they get a fever, or shakes or chills. But in general it’s a fairly safe drug," said Dr. Kontaxis.

On Friday the president's physician announced he was given "a single 8 gram dose of Regeneron's polyclonal antibody cocktail."

The method of treatment, which has not been approved by the FDA, is called REGN-COV2.

"They weren’t getting antibodies from a patient that recovered, these were antibodies made in the lab based on recovered patients' antibodies and then put together in a drug basically that has 2 antibodies that attack the virus," said Dr. Kontaxis.

The basis of the treatment comes from convalescent plasma, a treatment for hospitalized COVID-19 patients, which became FDA approved in August under Emergency Use Authorization.

According to pharmaceutical company, Regeneron's website,

Our COVID-19-related discovery efforts started in early 2020, when we produced hundreds of virus-neutralizing antibodies in our genetically-engineered mice and identified similarly-performing antibodies from human COVID-19 survivors. By June, we had moved the two potent antibodies that form REGN-COV2 into cell production lines for large-scale manufacturing purposes and begun clinical trials.

The treatment remains experimental. The company indicated that after testing 275 people, the medication "reduced viral load and the time to alleviate symptoms in non-hospitalized patients with COVID-19."