Antibody treatment Trump touts relied on testing with cells derived from fetal tissue
President Trump received an experimental antibody cocktail as part of a treatment regimen for covid-19 he has extolled as “miracles coming down from God,” even though its development relied on cells derived from human fetal tissue, a material his administration opposes.
The effectiveness of the antibody therapy was tested by employing a fetal tissue cell line from the 1980s widely used in biomedical research, according to Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, its manufacturer. The cell line is old enough that it would fall outside restrictions on federal funding of fetal tissue research the Trump administration imposed last year, according to National Institutes of Health guidelines.
But the president’s repeated praise for the antibody cocktail he requested and received when he was first hospitalized nearly a week ago has generated controversy, given his clampdown on fetal tissue research at the urging of social conservatives crucial to his political base.
“It’s blatant hypocrisy,” said Lawrence Goldstein, a senior faculty member at the University of California at San Diego, who has used fetal tissue in his research. “A lot of the opponents [of fetal tissue research] have looked the other way” when it comes to the cell line involved in both the Regeneron therapy and some of the coronavirus vaccines being developed, said Goldstein, who sits on a federal ethics advisory board created over the summer to review whether NIH should provide federal grants or contracts to researchers whose proposals were deemed scientifically deserving. The board recommended rejecting all but one of the 14 proposals.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/trump-antibody-treatment-fetal-tissue/2020/10/08/92f9b2d6-0971-11eb-9be6-cf25fb429f1a_story.html
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