Ironic Twist: In Spring, Trump Halted Research Key To COVID-19 Drug He's Now Taken

President Trump has credited the apparent improvement of his coronavirus infection to, as he put it in one tweet, "some really great drugs" that were "developed, under the Trump Administration."

The assertion carries special irony for researcher Peter Daszak.

For years Daszak led a U.S.-funded project that played an important role in the emergence of one of those drugs — remdesivir — as a promising treatment for COVID-19. Specifically, Daszak's U.S.-based research group, EcoHealth Alliance, collaborated with scientists in China to collect fluid samples from bats there in search of coronaviruses that could pose a threat if they spilled over into humans.

Beginning in 2014, virus experts in the U.S. tested remdesivir against some of the bat strains that EcoHealth Alliance had discovered. The results were promising — helping to elevate remdesivir's profile within pharmaceutical research such that, when the current coronavirus hit, the drug was one of the first options scientists proposed trying against it.