Rudy Giuliani, the public leader of a quixotic effort by Donald Trump to overturn the 2020 presidential election, was released from hospital on Wednesday evening after being treated for Covid-19.
Giuliani received “exactly the same” treatment that Trump received during his own hospitalization in October, the former New York mayor said, apparently including a drug cocktail of monoclonal antibodies that few patients have access to.
“His doctor sent me here; he talked me into it,” Giuliani said of the president in an interview with a local New York radio station. “The minute I took the cocktail yesterday, I felt 100% better. It works very quickly, wow.”
Giuliani, 76, was admitted to Georgetown University hospital in Washington DC on Monday.
“My treatment by the nurses and staff at Georgetown Med Star hospital was miraculous,” the former New York mayor tweeted on Thursday. “I walked in with serious symptoms. I walked out better than ever.”
That account echoed the experiences of other members of Trump’s inner circle who have fallen grievously ill with coronavirus and been treated with monoclonal antibodies, synthetically manufactured proteins that mimic the immune system’s ability to fight off viruses.
But almost no one has access to the treatments in question: a cocktail manufactured by Regeneron and a similar treatment made by Eli Lilly.
The health secretary, Alex Azar, said on Wednesday that a total of 278,000 doses of the two therapies had been distributed in past months. Some states use a lottery system to allocate the drugs, while others rank patients by eligibility, the New York Times reported.
The United States has confirmed 15.5m cases of coronavirus over time, and more than 106,000 people are currently hospitalized in the United States with Covid-19, according to the Covid tracking project.
Giuliani, who has mocked contact tracing on Fox News and said people “overdo the mask”, is not the first member of Trump’s inner circle to credit the hard-to-get treatment with a fast return to health.
After the housing secretary, Ben Carson, 69, emerged from the hospital last month, he wrote on Facebook that he had been “desperately ill” but “President Trump was following my condition and cleared me for the monoclonal antibody therapy that he had previously received, which I am convinced saved my life.”
After being hospitalized in early October at Walter Reed medical center, Trump, 74, told the radio host Rush Limbaugh, “I might not have recovered at all” without the drug cocktail.
Like many members of his inner circle, Trump has derided the pandemic as an overblown hoax and encouraged Americans to resist public health advice.
Giuliani tweeted on Thursday that he felt well enough to continue his election quest, announcing a meeting with Georgia Republicans to talk about election fraud claims, for which no evidence has been produced and which Giuliani himself has not dared to advance in court.
Giuliani credited his celebrity status with his successful course of treatment.
“If it wasn’t me, I wouldn’t have been put in a hospital, frankly,” Giuliani told WABC New York. “Sometimes when you’re a celebrity, they’re worried if something happens to you they’re going to examine it more carefully, and do everything right.”