The Chief’s Chief by Mark Meadows

Author:Mark Meadows [Meadows, Mark Frank]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-12-07T05:00:00+00:00

— TEN —

Emergency Use

“I NEED YOUR HELP,” I said.

It was late in the afternoon, and President Trump was still about ninety minutes from the White House. I had managed to get Leonard Schleifer on the phone after a few rings, which tends to happen when you’re calling from a West Wing phone number. I wanted to keep my suspicions about the president’s health quiet, so I told him we were looking for a few doses of Regeneron to use as a prophylactic measure, but I didn’t say for whom. I did tell him that Hope Hicks and the First Lady had tested positive for the virus, and that others in the West Wing were at risk. At the moment, though, I said we needed four doses, and we needed them now. I also asked him to speak candidly with me for a moment about the real efficacy of his drug; if there was something better out there—no matter what it was or where it came from—I wanted to know.

“What would you do,” I asked him, pleading, “if it was your family?”

For a moment, Len stopped being the head of a cutting-edge biotechnology company and became a friend, both to me and to the president. He explained why his drug, which was supposed to have the same effects as a similar drug introduced by Eli Lilly earlier in the year, was superior. He said that if it were him and his family who were at risk, he would administer the drug without thinking twice. The Regeneron treatment, according to Len, looked at the monoclonal treatment from two different aspects, while the Eli Lilly drug used only one. He predicted that eventually Eli Lilly would have to change their treatment so that it was more like Regeneron’s. A few months later, he would turn out to be correct.

Again, I wasn’t going to pretend that I had any real idea what he was talking about at the time. For all I knew, Len could have been describing the inside of my blender. What I did know was that we were in trouble, and the word of a trusted friend of the president—who, as it happened, was also one of the sharpest biotech CEOs in the country—was good enough for me.

I asked Len if we could have four doses sent by plane, and in secret, to the White House. I impressed upon him once more that secrecy was of the utmost importance, and he agreed. He said he would arrange for a jet to fly the doses from an airport near their manufacturing plant in New York to Reagan National Airport in Washington, DC. The Regeneron would arrive in a matter of hours. When it did, the cowboy pilot got out in his boots and jeans, with a fresh coffee stain on his shirt. But he had our precious cargo.

Now all I had to do was get permission from the FDA to use it.

________________

Now, that might not sound like the hardest thing in the world.

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