Presidential son Eric Trump apparently thinks that a coronavirus vaccine has been fully developed and his father took it after he caught the virus in order to defeat COVID-19.
If you are confused by that, you aren’t alone.
Eric Trump appeared on ABC’s This Week on Sunday morning to discuss President Donald Trump’s return to public events and campaign rallies despite his recent hospitalization for coronavirus. Prior to the younger Trump’s interview, guest host Jonathan Karl told viewers that the White House refused their request to bring on public health experts from the coronavirus task force.
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“While his physician says the president is no longer contagious, the American public is still in the dark about basic questions, such as when the president last tested negative for COVID, and whether he is now completely in the clear of the disease,” Karl noted, adding: “We had hoped to talk to Dr. Fauci about both the outbreak at the White House and across the country. He was more than willing to join us, but the White House wouldn’t allow you to hear from the nation’s leading expert on coronavirus.”
Turning to the president’s son, Karl asked if he was concerned about his father hitting the campaign trail considering his recent battle with the serious disease. After Eric defended this weekend’s White House event that the president spoke at, noting that most attendees were wearing masks, Karl brought up the president telling radio host Rush Limbaugh that there was a moment when he was concerned he might succumb to the disease.
“How bad did it get?” Karl wondered aloud.
“Listen, that first day he got hit hard, Friday,” Trump said. “As a son, it’s never fun to watch your father fly off to Walter reed on Marine One. It’s a day no son wants to remember.”
He went on to say that the following day, he spoke with his father multiple times and “the guy sounded 100 percent,” crediting the medications and therapeutics the president took during his hospital stay.
Except, according to Trump, his dad was given a vaccine.
“It goes to speak how good some of these vaccines that are being created are and what my father's done on the vaccine front no one could have done,” Trump boasted. “My father literally started day one creating this vaccine, he worked to push this vaccine and now my father just took it and you see how well he got over it.”
“Can you clarify that? You said your father just took a vaccine?” Karl pushed back, wondering if Trump was referencing the therapeutics the president took during his stay.
Eric Trump quickly shifted, saying that it “shows the power of medicine and how far we’ve come on COVID,” noting that he was talking about the “medicines he was taking” at Walter Reed.
This isn’t the first time that Eric Trump has falsely asserted that the president took a “vaccine” during his hospital stay. (This is, of course, not how vaccines work—patients don’t take vaccines after they’ve been infected with a disease.)
“There's never been vaccines that were created so quickly, my father was just on one of them… it knocked it out in 24 hours,” Eric said during a radio interview on Oct. 7.
The president himself has repeatedly referred to the experimental cocktail of monoclonal antibodies he took from Regeneron Pharmaceuticals as a “cure” and that he is now “immune” to the virus.
“I think this was a blessing from God that I caught [the virus], I think it was a blessing in disguise,” Trump said in a video last week. “I caught it, I heard about this drug, I said, 'Let me take it' … and it was incredible the way it worked.”
The president has also suggested the expensive treatment is more important than a vaccine and has promised senior citizens, without an explanation or plan, that he will make it “free” for them to take in the future.
