Q: Is President Trump the anonymous 79-year-old man getting a still-unapproved obesity drug
A: A news article, and subsequently Democratic lawmakers, questioned whether Trump is receiving the Eli Lilly weight-loss drug, which is reportedly being given to one 79-year-old man. However, the White House has said the unnamed man isn’t the president
FULL ANSWER
When we recently published an article about Trump’s claims regarding access to unapproved drugs for seriously ill patients, several readers brought up the news about the Eli Lilly drug in comments on our social media posts. The readers referred to speculation — or speculated themselves — that Trump was the man receiving the unapproved weight-loss drug
The White House has refuted the speculation, and there’s no evidence that Trump has received access to the drug.
On June 23, STAT first reported that an unnamed, likely well-connected 79-year-old man was the only person receiving retatrutide, an unapproved weight-loss drug from Eli Lilly, through the FDA’s “compassionate use” program. The program enables patients with serious illnesses to get access to unapproved drugs outside of clinical trials, if the drug company agrees.
STAT attributed the news to “threefear of reprisals” and said the request for the drug “drew the interest of top health officials, suggesting the person receiving this drug was well connected.”
STAT reported that it was unusual for just one person to receive the weight-loss drug through the compassionate use program. “In interviews, 18 bioethics experts, obesity clinicians, and current and former government health officials told STAT that the application struck them as unusual. One after another, they questioned why Lilly would offer compassionate use — also known as expanded access — for a single patient when obesity is such a widespread condition. Often, drugmakers will establish compassionate use programs for large cohorts of patients,” the story said.
Trump turned 80 on June 14, and STAT reported that the person in question was 79 when the drug was requested in April. This year, the president weighed 238 pounds at his May physical, up 14 pounds from his checkup in April 2025. During a January interview with the New York Times, Trump said that he has never taken a weight-loss drug but “probably should.”
The identity of the 79-year-old patient is unknown, STAT said, but “given the patient demographics and the unusual nature of the application,” the news outlet asked the White House if the anonymous man was Trump. The White House didn’t initially provide a clear answer, but it did after the story was published
The news article prompted Democratic lawmakers, including Rep. Ted Lieu and Sen. Maggie Hassan, to also question whether Trump was the one receiving the drug, despite the White House’s denials
White House Response
On June 23, the writer of the STAT story, Lizzy Lawrence, posted on X that “I asked the WH if this patient was President Trump, who turned 80 a week ago. I did not get a direct answer.”
In response that same day, White House Senior Deputy Press Secretary Kush Desai posted: “Because this has to be spelled out for @LizzyLaw_, who has proven herself to be an unserious gossip columnist, this application was not for the President.”
White House Director of Communications Steven Cheung also chimed in, telling Lawrence “[y]ou certainly made a name for yourself by completely embarrassing yourself at the expense of being thirsty for clicks and peddling falsehoods.”
Democratic Lawmakers’ Statements
Speaking during a June 24 press conference, Lieu, of California, stated: “What we know is there’s a report saying that one person in America got this special, new drug. It was a 79-year-old person who’s very high-profile, and this drug can only be given to someone under the compassionate use provision, meaning you do that if someone basically has a terminal illness. So we need to know did Donald Trump get this special drug from Eli Lilly, and did he get it under that provision? And if he did, why is that the case? The White House needs to come clean and tell the American people about Donald Trump’s health.”
That same day, Hassan, of New Hampshire, wrote a letter to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., telling him, “I am deeply concerned by new reporting that suggests you may be bending the rules of a federal program, and exerting improper political pressure, in order to provide a well-connected individual with free access to an exclusive prescription drug.”
Like Lieu, Hassan questioned whether the individual receiving the drug was the president, writing in her letter that “reporting clearly suggests that this individual was the President or someone closely connected to him.”
We reached out to Lieu’s and Hassan’s offices to ask why they questioned whether Trump got the drug even though the White House said he did not. In response, Sahil Mehrotra, a spokesperson for Hassan, pointed to our work fact-checking the president’s statements over time. “This President and his Administration have repeatedly misled and lied to the American people, as catalogued by Factcheck.org,” Mehrotra said. “They also have a long record of corruption and self-dealing to benefit the Administration’s friends and family.”
Granting access to the drug in this case “is clearly outside the norm,” Mehrotra continued. Hassan is asking Kennedy “to provide answers about whether the President, another Administration official, or one of the President’s donors or friends is receiving this special access to weight-loss medication as families struggle to pay for prescription drugs. The Administration has thus far refused to respond.”
Lieu’s office did not respond to our inquiry
What We Know About the Drug
The FDA uses “compassionate use” as an alternative name for the expanded access program, <a href="https://www.fda.gov/news-events/public-health-focus/expanded-access” rel=”nofollow noopener” target=”_blank”>which it calls “a potential pathway for a patient with a serious or immediately life-threatening disease or condition to gain access to an investigational medical product.”
Compassionate use is different from Right to Try, a law Trump signed in 2018. Under Right to Try, terminally ill patients also can get access to experimental drugs from manufacturers but without FDA approval. As we’ve reported, there’s no evidence for Trump’s repeated claim that Right to Try has “saved thousands of lives.”
The compassionate use program has a high approval rate. For fiscal years 2019 through 2023, the FDA approved 99% of the approximately 18,000 single-patient expanded access Investigational New Drug requests
In this case, the drug — retatrutide — has been shown to be effective in clinical trials in helping patients lose weight. In May, Eli Lilly reported that a phase 3 randomized controlled trial found that those taking the once-a-week injectable drug for 80 weeks lost from 19% to 28.3% of their body weight, on average, depending on the dosage level. The placebo group lost 2.2% of body weight on average. In total, 2,339 people were in the trial
The drug manufacturer subsequently reported that it also found “meaningful improvements” in subsets of patients with knee osteoarthritis pain or moderate-to-severe obstructive sleep apnea. Another trial evaluated efficacy and safety in treating those with type 2 diabetes. The company notes that the drug is only available now for those participating in its clinical trials
But one person has been given the drug through the FDA’s expanded access program
The news outlet reported that Ranganath Muniyappa, a National Institutes of Health senior clinician, requested retatrutide under the expanded access program “to treat the patient for refractory obesity with obstructive sleep apnea and pulmonary hypertension, a severe version of the disease. Pulmonary hypertension is high blood pressure in the lungs, which can be life-threatening.” As STAT noted, Trump’s latest medical exam memo doesn’t mention either of those conditions
STAT said that it’s not unprecedented for a high-profile person to get an unapproved drug through the FDA program. In 2020, Trump received an experimental antibody treatment after testing positive for COVID-19
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