“There’s no cure.”
People are frightened when they hear these words. I know I was.
For those of you who don’t know my story, after surviving a medical error in 2015 only to be diagnosed with a rare bone cancer, I found myself without the luxury of time to wait for a potentially life-saving treatment to be approved.
Sound familiar? Millions of Americans right now are unfortunately experiencing my same fear—as we don’t have the luxury of waiting months or even years for a coronavirus cure to be approved. Although the coronavirus is certainly different than cancer, it’s still the same invisible enemy of death. But just because the enemy is invisible doesn’t mean it’s unbeatable. Especially when you’re fighting for your life—and suddenly find Donald Trump fighting for it too.
President Trump recently announced his visionary Right to Try approach to combatting the coronavirus, exploring experimental treatments that could potentially eradicate the virus even “around the 5th day of treatment.”
But some alarmists are already crying “danger, danger,” denouncing the President as giving “a false sense of hope,” and even going so far as trying to scare people into thinking the treatment might “kill” you.
So what’s new? Many fought against giving the terminally ill the Right to Try for almost half a century—until President Trump got it done. For the life of me, I don’t see what’s so dangerous about having the Right to Try a potentially life-saving treatment if you know without it you’re going to die anyway. Like the President says, “What do you have to lose?” because “you know, we can bring our finances back very quickly. We can’t bring the people back.”
As we learn of the vast array of bureaucratic roadblocks the Trump administration is breaking down and through just to make coronavirus tests available, Americans are finally realizing that regulations designed to safeguard public health under normal circumstances can be deadly when patients need immediate treatment. When you’ve exhausted all options, the last thing you want to die from is politics and bureaucracy. That’s why President Trump is fighting tirelessly to “[slash] red tape to develop vaccines and therapies as fast as it can possibly be done” including exploring the promising combination of “Hydroxychloroquine & Azithromycin” as well as initiating “the first clinical trial of a vaccine candidate for the virus…launched in record time.”
That’s why I’m not afraid of the coronavirus even though I’m obviously not ignorant to the fact that I—like millions of Americans with pre-existing conditions—am more at risk, especially those of us living in high-impact states like California. As I’ve written previously, cancer prepared me for the coronavirus outbreak. I’ve already been left to die in red tape before—only to have Donald Trump cut it and save my life.
Obviously none of us know if the next page in our stories is going to be a happily ever after—or a heavenly one. But I don’t know about you, I’d rather take a chance on life than the certainty of death any day. And when you choose to take a risk and turn the page rather than stay and die on the page you’re on, you just might find the same Good Samaritan saving your life too.