Eric Trump falsely calls president’s coronavirus treatment a vaccine

President Trump’s son Eric Trump on Sunday called his father’s treatment for COVID-19 a vaccine that he further claimed the president helped create from “day one.”

“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,” Eric Trump told Jonathan Karl of ABC’s “This Week.” 

“Wait, wait,” Karl interrupted before Eric Trump said that Americans should be inspired by and proud of what doctors call his father’s speedy recovery from an illness that has killed more than 214,000 and infected 7.7 million people in the U.S. alone.

“Can you clarify that you said your father just took a vaccine?” Karl asked.

“Meaning when he was at Walter Reed, the medicines that he was taking,” Eric Trump answered before adding that until his father went to the hospital, “he felt horrible.” 

President Trump’s doctors said that he was given a steroid in response to low oxygen levels, the antiviral drug Remdesivir and an experimental antibody therapy from Regeneron.

There is no approved or authorized vaccine for COVID-19 in the U.S. or elsewhere. Several companies and research teams globally are in a multibillion-dollar race to develop a vaccine, hoping that one might be delivered by early 2021.

President Trump was taken to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center on Oct. 2 after announcing early that morning that he and first lady Melania Trump had tested positive for the coronavirus. His doctors eventually admitted that the president was given oxygen at the White House before he was taken on Marine One to the hospital.

Eric Trump said on Sunday that by the very next day, his father sounded “tremendous,” the same day doctors said the president once again had to be given oxygen at Walter Reed.

“I spoke to him three times that next Saturday. The guy sounded 100 percent. It was amazing,” Eric Trump said.

Doctors and White House staff sent a series of conflicting messages on the president’s health throughout that weekend. The president was also criticized for leaving his hospital presidential suite that Sunday for a drive to wave to supporters while he was infected with the highly contagious virus. 

On Monday, President Trump was discharged from the hospital, returning to the White House that evening, where he walked up the South Portico stairs to the Truman Balcony and took off his mask before going inside the residence, where some of his staff could be seen.

Eric Trump on Sunday lauded his father’s personal efforts in pushing for a COVID-19 vaccine without acknowledging that doctors never said his father was given one and instead was offered a cocktail of experimental therapeutics.

“It actually probably goes to speak to how good some of these vaccines are that are being created,” Eric Trump told ABC. “What my father’s done on the vaccine front no one could have done.”