“compassionate use” rules, which allow a patient with a life-threatening disease to get an experimental medicine if they can’t enroll in a study testing it and there’s no good alternative.
Trump was given the drug at the White House on Friday before he was taken to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. Walter Reed is not a site where the drug is being tested, so he may have met that criterion on technical grounds.
Had he enrolled in a study, he would have risked being randomly assigned to a comparison group getting usual care rather than getting the drug.Compassionate use requests are decided on a case-by-case basis, and both the drug company and the U.S.