Ex-Obama Health Adviser Zeke Emanuel Tells Maddow That Trump Faces ‘Substantial Risk of Dying’ From Covid

Former Obama health care adviser Dr. Zeke Emanuel delivered a sobering reminder to MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow when he said that President Donald Trump faces “substantial risk of dying” from the coronavirus infection he’s now being treated for.

On Friday night’s edition of MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show, host Rachel Maddow set the table for her interview with Emanuel by going over the background on Trump’s diagnosis and hospitalization for covid, then did her trademark self-check with her guest.

“Correct me if anything I laid out there is wrong or I am putting wrong emphasis in terms of people understanding the severity of what we are up against here,” Maddow said to Dr. Emanuel.

“First of all, to have the most powerful man in the world, the leader of the free world, our president, with somewhere between a 5 percent and 11 percent, 12 percent risk of dying, I don’t think that’s so trivial — that’s pretty substantial risk of dying in the next few weeks,” Emanuel said, adding that “that, I think, is a national security threat. It is something to take every, very seriously.”

It’s important to note that Dr. Emanuel’s assessment is based on statistics and risk factors, not medical knowledge of Trump’s condition.

He went on to add that “The odds are for him, but those are very high odds, and I’m speaking as an oncologist who took care of a lot of people with cancer.”

Dr. Emanuel also said that :the White House has consistently downplayed, underplayed, misspoken about the seriousness of this of the president’s condition, and that “I think this is much more serious than we’ve been told. But we won’t know until we have a frank briefing from one of the Walter Reed doctors who will actually give us the basic information we need to evaluate the president’s condition.”

To Emanuel’s point, there has been a considerable gulf between the White House line on Trump’s condition and the reporting from outside that information stream.

Trump is currently hospitalized at Walter Reed and undergoing treatment with Remdesivir.