President Donald Trump Thursday credited his treatment with Regeneron's monoclonal antibody coronavirus therapy with his quick recovery from COVID-19 and said he had figured all along that there would be a chance he'd catch the virus because of the demands of his job.
"I don't have any heart problems, I don't have diabetes, I don't have any of the problems you read about," Trump told Fox Business' Maria Bartiromo in an extensive phone interview for "Mornings With Maria." "[There are] perhaps a couple of pounds we could lose here and there, but, you know, there's a lot of people in that category. But no, I am in good health and I am you know, look, being what happens is if you are anywhere around this thing you can catch it."
But what happens, he added, is "you get better."
"We have drugs now that we didn't even know about four months ago," Trump said. "I am not even talking about remdesivir. It is fine. But the Regeneron, was, I view it as a cure not just a therapeutic."
He added that the pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly also has a drug much along the same lines as the Regeneron antibody cocktail. Trump reiterated that he will push for Food and Drug Administration approval of the Regeneron treatment and will make it available for nationwide distribution.
He added that as a leader, he can't be "like [Joe] Biden, hiding out in a basement every day."
"I meet a lot of people," he said. "I have to. I am president of the country. I can't hang around in a basement. I figured there would be a chance that I would catch it sometime."
He pointed out, for example, that he meets often with Gold Star families and they hug and sometimes even kiss him when talking about their family members lost in war.
"I can't say, 'Back up, stand 10 feet away,'" said Trump. "I am not telling them to back up," even though it's a "dangerous thing" for people to be close, given the pandemic.