A White House spokesperson has officially denied that Donald Trump is the mysterious sole patient who’s been granted access to Eli Lilly’s experimental obesity drug retatruide.
Retatruide is being positioned as the next generation of anti-obesity drugs, with initial data from a Phase 3 trial saying obese patients who took the drug for 80 weeks lost 28% of their starting weight. Hype is building for its release, though it’s currently not authorized for use outside clinical trials.
However, according to a report by Stat News, one person alone was given early access in April to retatrutide on the grounds of “compassionate use”. As per Ars Technica, this request was made by a senior clinician at the National Institutes of Health, Ranganath Muniyappa, for a 79-year-old patient “with refractory obesity, obstructive sleep apnea, and pulmonary hypertension”.
Stat News says records indicate this patient had been taking GLP-1 and GIP drug tirzepatide for a year, a drug that targets the GLP-1 and GIP hormones to limited weight loss success. The report confirms that they were not recommended for bariatric surgery, and this sole use of retatrutide was approved.
Speculation began building that Trump, who was 79 when the request was made and who broadly matches this medical description, was the patient. Ars Technica notes that the public notice omits “much of the information” that would normally be expected and quotes former FDA employee Richard Klein as saying:
“Only people in the know would be able to find this [notice], using the drug name. There is something very wrong with the way this is listed because no one would know what it is from the listing, or what it’s for.”
“There is something very wrong with the way this is listed”
The White House and the Department of Health and Human Services were both asked if Trump was the mystery patient. White House spokesperson Kush Desai has come down hard on this story, saying that “this application was not for the President” and dismissing the story as “baseless speculation”.
Thank you for clarifying. I asked you, the FDA, and HHS multiple times yesterday whether this application was for the President. No one answered my question directly.
— Lizzy Lawrence (@LizzyLaw_) June 23, 2026
He continued:
“We shouldn’t have to bat down baseless speculation for you to not print it. Any reporter with standards would understand this. Are you going to now go ask this idiotic question to the ~4 million Americans in this age cohort and then speculate about them being the application?”
In response to requests for comment, Lilly spokesperson Misty Fuller simply said, “We make these decisions following all applicable regulations”, while the NIH’s Ranganath Muniyappa did not give a response.
Published: Jun 25, 2026 07:03 am