The health-focused news outlet STAT on Tuesday published a bombshell report that suggests President Donald Trump may have used his position of power to obtain a powerful new obesity drug not yet approved by the Food and Drug Administration.

According to the report, the FDA in April allowed one 79-year-old man to obtain Eli Lilly’s retatrutide, an experimental weight-loss drug, through a “compassionate use” waiver. That kind of waiver, according to the FDA, allows for a “patient with a serious or immediately life-threatening disease or condition to gain access to an investigational medical product (drug, biologic, or medical device) for treatment outside of clinical trials when no comparable or satisfactory alternative therapy options are available.”

Given the age of the applicant matches Trump’s in April, as well as the fact that he sought a compassionate use waiver before for an experimental treatment when he was diagnosed with COVID-19 at the height of the pandemic, STAT reached out to the White House to ask if the man who got retatrutide is Trump.

Initially, the White House did not deny that Trump was the applicant. A spokesperson instead directed STAT to the Department of Health and Human Services, which also didn’t deny that Trump was the recipient of the waiver.

Only after STAT’s article was published did White House spokesperson Kush Desai take to X to say that “this application was not for the President.”

But for a White House that relishes denying reports, why didn’t it speak up when the reporter says she asked Desai, HHS, and the FDA “multiple times” and that “[n]o one answered my question directly”?

If the person who got the compassionate use waiver for retatrutide were indeed Trump, it would mean the administration is lying to the public about his serious health conditions.

According to the application, the 79-year-old man who sought the waiver had “refractory obesity with obstructive sleep apnea and pulmonary hypertension,” per STAT. The outlet also reports that the man took tirzepatide—an FDA-approved weight-loss drug—for a year but did not see much weight loss.

None of those conditions, nor the tirzepatide, are listed on Trump’s latest public medical report. According to that report, Trump is 238 pounds—one pound below being classified as obese for his claimed 6’3″ height.

Trump’s medical report also does not list sleep apnea, nor does it list pulmonary hypertension—a serious form of high blood pressure that, according to the Mayo Clinic, can be “life-threatening.”

The Mayo Clinic says the condition makes the heart “work harder to pump blood through the lungs. The extra effort eventually causes the heart muscle to become weak and fail.”

Among the symptoms of pulmonary hypertension are “fatigue” and “swelling in the ankles, legs and belly area.” And we’ll just point out that Trump is on camera falling asleep at events and has swollen ankles.

Of course, there is one sign that the person who received the compassionate use waiver is not Trump: He does not appear to have lost weight.

Trump, for his part, has spoken about weight-loss drugs before. In May, he talked about a friend of his who was on the “fat drug.”

“He’s a very highly neurotic, very fat—sort of a fat slob, I would call him,” Trump said at a news conference. “But he’s a brilliant man. We know many of those people.”

Trump didn’t stop there.

“He’s begging me not to release his name, because he’s a well-known person. And I just destroyed his reputation in terms of his physicality,” Trump continued. “And he just doesn’t want—and I said, ‘You know, you had a big impact on medicine because you got to me better than any normal person could have,’ you know?”

Might that “fat slob” of a friend be John Barron?

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos