This election cycle — coinciding with a looming threat to the Affordable Care Act and millions of people losing jobs and employer-sponsored health insurance during the pandemic — the high price of prescription drugs has gained new significance.

This article was published on Tuesday, October 20, 2020 in Kaiser Health News.

By Aneri Pattani

During the first presidential debate of 2020, President Donald Trump touted his efforts to curb skyrocketing drug prices and declared that insulin is now “so cheap, it’s like water.” The response on social media was swift, and divided, with some people sharing pharmacy bills showing thousands of dollars they’d spent on insulin, while others boasted of newfound savings.

The next day, a self-described progressive political action committee called Change Now jumped into the fray by releasing an ad that circulated on Facebook attacking Trump and Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) on this issue.

In the 30-second ad, a North Carolina woman in her 30s explains she was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes at age 4.

“Donald Trump and Thom Tillis opposed legislation that would lower the price of insulin and other prescription drugs,” she says. “People with diabetes can’t afford to wait for Trump and Tillis to fight for us. … We need affordable insulin now.”

(Posts sharing the quote were flagged as part of Facebook’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its news feed. Read more about PolitiFact’s partnership with Facebook.)

In recent years, politicians on both sides of the aisle have committed to addressing the cost of insulin. This election cycle — coinciding with a looming threat to the Affordable Care Act and millions of people losing jobs and employer-sponsored health insurance during the pandemic — the high price of prescription drugs has gained new significance.

Tillis is in one of the most heated Senate races in the country and has been repeatedly criticized by his opponent for receiving more than $400,000 in campaign contributions from the pharmaceutical and health product industries. Across the country, many voters say lowering prescription drug costs should be the top health priority for elected officials.

So, did Trump and Tillis really oppose policies that would accomplish that goal? We decided to take a closer look.

It turns out they’ve both opposed certain pieces of legislation that could have lowered the price of insulin and other prescription drugs, but they’ve also offered alternatives. The question is how aggressive those alternatives are and how many Americans would benefit from them.

Opposing the Strongest Reforms

Change Now pointed to two congressional bills to support the ad’s claim: one opposed by Trump, and the other by Tillis.

The first bill, known as H.R. 3, passed the House in December 2019, largely due to Democratic votes. It contains three main elements: decreasing out-of-pocket costs for people on Medicare, penalizing pharmaceutical companies that raise the price of drugs faster than the rate of inflation and — the most aggressive and controversial feature — allowing the federal government, which administers Medicare, to negotiate the price of certain drugs, including insulin. It also requires manufacturers to offer those agreed-on prices to private insurers, extending the benefits to a wider swath of Americans.

Stacie Dusetzina, an associate professor of health policy at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, called it “the broadest-reaching policy that has been put forward” on drug pricing.

“While a lot of reform has focused on Medicare beneficiaries, that misses many insulin users,” Dusetzina said. “H.R. 3 does the most to affect prices for young consumers, like the woman in the ad.”

At the time, Trump vowed to veto that bill, saying the price controls it imposed “would likely undermine access to lifesaving medications” by decreasing the incentive for companies to innovate. When we checked in with the Trump campaign about the ad, a spokesperson reiterated this position, adding that the president continues to seek better legislative options.

The House bill in question, though, never made it to the president’s desk because the Senate didn’t take it up. Instead, the Senate Finance Committee proposed its own bill, which brings us to the second piece of legislation cited by Change Now.

Known as the Prescription Drug Pricing Reduction Act of 2019, the Senate bill echoes two aims of the House proposal: decreasing out-of-pocket costs for people on Medicare and putting an inflation-based cap on some drug prices.

That bill, too, stalled, with several Republican senators wary of the inflation cap. Among them was Tillis, who expressed concern that the measure could hamper innovation.

So, it’s true that Trump and Tillis have both opposed legislation that could lower the cost of insulin and other prescription drugs. But that’s not the full picture of what either politician has done on this issue.

Alternative Solutions for a Smaller Group of Americans

The Trump campaign provided a long list of actions taken by his administration to curb the high costs of medication, including a flurry of executive orders related to insulin and prescription drugs. Tillis’ campaign highlighted an alternative bill the senator co-sponsored to target drug costs. Let’s break them down one at a time.

One of Trump’s orders aims to have Federally Qualified Health Centers provide insulin and EpiPens at a discounted rate to the low-income individuals they serve. These centers, however, are already required to offer sliding-scale payments, and a full discount to patients who earn below the federal poverty line, said Rachel Sachs, an associate professor of law at Washington University in St. Louis, who tracks drug-pricing laws.

Another order deals with the importation of drugs from Canada, where they are often cheaper. Although the order specifically excludes biologic drugs, including insulin, the administration has requested proposals from private companies on how insulin could be safely brought in from other countries.

The president also issued a particularly ambitious order that seeks to tie the price Medicare pays for drugs to a lower international reference price. The Trump administration, however, hasn’t released final regulations to implement that policy, which could take years. If implemented, the policy is expected to be challenged in court by the drug industry.

Perhaps the most notable measure on insulin at the moment, experts said, is a federal demonstration project that Medicare plans can voluntarily opt into, to cap the monthly copay for insulin at $35 for some seniors. The project is slated to begin in January 2021, but its long-term future is uncertain, Sachs said, because it relies on parts of the Affordable Care Act, which could be struck down by a Supreme Court ruling later this year.

In Congress, Tillis and five other Republican senators introduced an alternative drug-pricing bill last December, called the Lower Costs, More Cures Act.

Tillis believes this is “the better option,” campaign spokesperson Andrew Romeo said, because “in addition to helping control drug prices, the legislation also seeks to preserve America’s capacity to research and develop lifesaving medications.” It includes a monthly cap on insulin copays for Medicare beneficiaries and requires manufacturers to disclose prices in consumer ads.

But experts said Tillis’ proposal is weaker than other options before the House and Senate. It doesn’t include an inflation cap, Sachs said, and the bill’s benefit would likely be limited to some seniors on Medicare, leaving out the more than 150 million Americans covered by private insurance.

Jason Roberts, an associate professor of political science at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, said the bill is largely symbolic.

“Tillis is getting hit for not supporting a bill that could move,” Roberts said. “Instead, he introduces something that has no chance of going anywhere, and he knows that. But it’s a way of trying to deflect that criticism without getting a lot accomplished.”

Our Ruling

An ad sponsored by a progressive political action committee claims that Trump and Tillis have opposed legislation that would decrease the cost of insulin and other prescription drugs.

Based on the two pieces of drug-pricing legislation Change Now points to, that’s accurate. Trump and Tillis have voiced opposition to prominent bills that experts say could decrease the cost of insulin for a broad group of Americans.

However, both politicians have also proposed alternative policies to lower the price of insulin and other prescription drugs. Most of their proposals have not taken effect yet and are largely targeted at seniors.

We rate the ad’s claim Mostly True.

Hundreds of thousands of Americans — including the president — have taken a chance on experimental therapies to treat or prevent COVID-19.

This article was published on Tuesday, October 20, 2020 in Kaiser Health News.

By JoNel Aleccia

When Terry Mutter woke up with a headache and sore muscles on a recent Wednesday, the competitive weightlifter chalked it up to a hard workout.

By that evening, though, he had a fever of 101 degrees and was clearly ill. "I felt like I had been hit by a truck," recalled Mutter, who lives near Seattle.

The next day he was diagnosed with COVID-19. By Saturday, the 58-year-old was enrolled in a clinical trial for the same antibody cocktail that President Donald Trump claimed was responsible for his coronavirus "cure."

"I had heard a little bit about it because of the news," said Mutter, who joined the study by drugmaker Regeneron to test whether its combination of two man-made antibodies can neutralize the deadly virus. "I think they probably treated him with everything they had."

Mutter learned about the study from his sister-in-law, who works at Seattle's Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, one of dozens of trial sites nationwide. He is among hundreds of thousands of Americans — including the president — who've taken a chance on experimental therapies to treat or prevent COVID-19.

But with nearly 8 million people in the U.S. infected with the coronavirus and more than 217,000 deaths attributed to COVID, many patients are unaware of such options or unable to access them. Others remain wary of unproven treatments that can range from drugs to vaccines.

"Honestly, I don't know whether I would have gotten a call if I hadn't known somebody who said, 'Hey, here's this study,'" said Mutter, a retired executive with Boeing Co.

The website clinicaltrials.gov, which tracks such research, reports more than 3,600 studies involving COVID-19 or SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes the disease. More than 430,000 people have volunteered for such studies through the COVID-19 Prevention Network. Thousands of others have received therapies, like the antiviral drug remdesivir, under federal emergency authorizations.

Faced with a dire COVID diagnosis, how do patients or their families know whether they can — or should — aggressively seek out such treatments? Conversely, how can they decide whether to refuse them if they're offered?

Such medical decisions are never easy — and they're even harder during a pandemic, said Annette Totten, an associate professor of medical informatics and clinical epidemiology at Oregon Health & Science University.

"The challenge is the evidence is not good because everything with COVID is new," said Totten, who specializes in medical decision-making. "I think it's hard to cut through all the noise."

Consumers have been understandably whipsawed by conflicting information about potential COVID treatments from political leaders, including Trump, and the scientific community. The antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine, touted by the president, received emergency authorization from the federal Food and Drug Administration, only to have the decision revoked several weeks later out of concern it could cause harm.

Convalescent plasma, which uses blood products from people recovered from COVID-19 to treat those who are still ill, was given to more than 100,000 patients in an expanded-access program and made widely available through another emergency authorization — even though scientists remain uncertain of its benefits.

Regeneron and the pharmaceutical firm Eli Lilly and Co. have both requested emergency use authorization for their monoclonal antibody therapies, even as scientists say such approval could jeopardize enrollment in the randomized controlled trials that will prove whether or how well they work. So far, about 2,500 people have enrolled in the Regeneron trials, with about 2,000 of them receiving the therapy, a company spokesperson said. Others have received the treatment through so-called compassionate use programs, though the company wouldn't say how many.

Last week, the National Institutes of Health paused the Lilly antibody trial after an independent monitoring board raised safety concerns.

"With all of the information swirling around in the media, it's hard for patients to make good decisions — and for doctors to make those decisions," said Dr. Benjamin Rome, a general internist and health policy researcher at Harvard Medical School's Portal program. "You shouldn't expect that what you've heard about on the news is the right treatment for you."

Even so, people facing COVID shouldn't be afraid to question whether treatment options are available to them, Rome said. "As a doctor, I never mind when patients ask," he said.

Patients and families should understand what the implications of those treatments might be, Totten advised. Early phase 1 clinical trials focus largely on safety, while larger phase 2 and phase 3 trials determine efficacy. Any experimental treatment raises the possibility of serious side effects.

Ideally, healthcare providers would provide such information about treatments and risks unprompted. But during a pandemic, especially in a high-stress environment, they might not, Totten noted.

"It's important to be sort of insistent," she said. "If you ask a question, you have to ask it again. Sometimes you have to be willing to be a little pushy," she said.

Patients and families should take notes or record conversations for later review. They should ask about financial compensation for participation. Many patients in COVID-19 trials are paid modest amounts for their time and travel.

And they should think about how any treatment fits into their larger system of values and goals, said Angie Fagerlin, a professor and the chair of the population health sciences department at the University of Utah.

"What are the pros and what are the cons?" Fagerlin said. "Where would your decision regret be: Not doing something and getting sicker? Or doing something and having a really negative reaction?"

One consideration may be the benefit to the wider society, not just yourself, she said. For Mutter, helping advance science was a big reason he agreed to enroll in the Regeneron trial.

"The main thing that made me interested in it was in order for therapeutics to move forward, they need people," he said. "At a time when there's so much we can't control, this would be a way to come up with some kind of a solution."

That decision led him to Fred Hutch, which is collaborating on two Regeneron trials, one for prevention of COVID-19 and one for treatment of the disease.

"It was a six-hour visit," he said. "It's two hours to get the infusion. It's a very slow IV drip."

Mutter was the second person enrolled in the treatment trial at Fred Hutch, said Dr. Shelly Karuna, a co-principal investigator. The study is testing high and low doses of the monoclonal antibody cocktail against a placebo.

"I am struck by the profound altruism of the people we are screening," she said.

Mutter isn't sure how he contracted COVID-19. He and his family have been careful about masks and social distancing — and critical of others who weren't.

"The irony now is that we're the ones who got sick," said Mutter, whose wife, Gina Mutter, 54, is also ill.

Mutter knows he has a 1-in-3 chance that he got a placebo rather than one of two active treatment dosages, but he said he was willing to take that chance. His wife didn't enroll in the trial.

"I said, there's some risks involved. We're taking one for the team here. I don't think we both need to do that," he said.

So far, Mutter has struggled with a persistent cough and lingering fatigue. He can't tell if his infusion has been helpful, never mind whether it's a cure.

"Just no way of telling if I got the antibodies or not," he said. "Did I get them and that kept me out of disaster, or did I get the placebo and my own immune system did its job?"

JoNel Aleccia: jaleccia@kff.org, @JoNel_Aleccia

UVA Health continues to rely on thousands of property liens to collect old bills.

This article was published on Monday, October 19, 2020 in Kaiser Health News.

By Jay Hancock

Doris Hutchinson wanted to use money from the sale of her late mother's house to help her grandchildren go to college.

Then she learned the University of Virginia Health System was taking $38,000 of the proceeds because a 13-year-old medical bill owed by her deceased brother had somehow turned into a lien on the property.

Over six years, the state institution filed 36,000 lawsuits against patients seeking a total of more than $106 million in unpaid bills, a KHN analysis finds.

"It was a mess," she said. "There are bills I could pay with that money. I could pay off my car, for one thing."

Property liens are the hidden icebergs of patient medical debt, legal experts say, lying unseen, often for decades, before they surface to claim hard-won family savings or inheritance proceeds.

An ongoing examination by KHN into hospital billing and collections in Virginia shows just how widespread and destructive they can be. KHN reported a year ago that UVA Health had sued patients 36,000 times over six years for more than $100 million, often for amounts far higher than what an insurer would have paid for their care. In response to the articles, the system temporarily suspended patient lawsuits and wage garnishments, increased discounts for the uninsured and broadened financial assistance, including for cases dating to 2017.

Those changes were "a first step" in reforming billing and collection practices, university officials said at the time.

However, UVA Health continues to rely on thousands of property liens to collect old bills, in contrast to VCU Health, another huge, state-owned medical system examined by KHN. VCU Health pledged in March to stop seizing patients' wages over unpaid bills and to remove all property liens, which are created after a creditor wins a court judgment.

Working courthouse-by-courthouse, VCU Health now says it has discovered and released 45,000 property liens filed against patients just in Richmond, its home city, some dating to the 1990s. There are an estimated 35,000 more in other parts of the state. Fifteen thousand of those have been canceled and they are working on the rest, officials said. These figures have not been previously reported. The system is part of Virginia Commonwealth University.

VCU Health's total caseload is "a huge number" but perhaps not astonishing given the energy with which many hospital systems sue their patients, said Carolyn Carter, deputy director of the National Consumer Law Center.

Despite having suspended patient lawsuits, UVA Health has continued to create property liens based on older court cases, court records show. The number of new liens is "small," said UVA Health spokesperson Eric Swensen.

An advisory council of UVA Health officials and community leaders is expected to deliver new recommendations by the end of October, Swensen said. The council, whose schedule has been slowed by the coronavirus crisis, has discussed property liens, Don Gathers, an activist and council member, said in an interview this summer.

Nobody knows how many old or new UVA Health liens are scattered through scores of Virginia courthouses. The health system, which has sued patients in almost every county and city in the state, has failed to respond to repeated requests over two years to disclose the number and value of its property liens.

But in Albemarle County alone, which surrounds the university's Charlottesville home, "there are thousands" of UVA Health judgments filed in the land records, which creates a lien, said Circuit Court Clerk Jon Zug.

Not just Virginia homes are at risk. UVA Health lawyers search the nation for property or other assets owned by patients with outstanding bills and have filed liens in Maryland, West Virginia, Ohio and Florida, court records show.

The system put a lien on a Nevada vacation condo owned by Veronica Musie's family a decade ago over a $30,600 hospital bill, said Musie, who lives in northern Virginia. The family has since paid the debt.

Virginia property liens expire after 20 years. But UVA Health often renews them. Since 2017, just in Albemarle County, it has renewed more than three dozen liens. That means the medical system could seize families' home equity until 2039 for bills dating to the last century.

UVA Health and other medical systems rarely force the sale of a home to claim money. Instead, they wait for families to refinance or sell, taking their cut at the settlement table. But with 6% simple interest accumulating year after year after the court judgment, as allowed by Virginia law, the final amount owed can be much more than the original charges.

UVA Health treated Hutchinson's brother for heart disease in the early 2000s. The unpaid bill was $24,868. The system laid claim to their mother's home because he was one of her heirs. The claim is up to $38,000 now, she said, because of interest charges. Hutchinson has been disputing it for more than a year.

VCU Health and its MCV Physicians affiliate estimate that eliminating two decades of property liens in courthouses across the state, which they began to do last year after KHN published its reports, won't be finished until spring.

Richmond was especially problematic. Because releasing 40,000 Richmond liens by hand would have been impractical, VCU Health got a judge's permission to do it with computer code.

Creditors such as UVA and VCU don't need addresses to create liens. All they have to do is file a judgment in county or city land records. If debtors own any property there, title companies won't approve a sale until the debt is paid, often with home equity.

Often owners don't know debts exist until paralegals unearth them when homes are sold, property pros say. Old debts can create liens on newly acquired real estate.

"It could be your grandmother's house, and as soon as you've inherited it, and you've got judgments, those [liens] are now attached," said Richmond Court Clerk Edward Jewett.

Frequently debtors own no property, so judgments in the land records expire without hospitals or other creditors getting anything.

VCU and MCV had no idea how many liens they had placed across the state until they began investigating last year after KHN's inquiries, officials said.

"It's an incredibly manual process" to cancel the claims, partly because computer systems at many courthouses prohibit an easy tech solution, said Melinda Hancock, VCU Health's chief administrative and financial officer. But it's worth it to remove a burden on patients, she said, adding, "This is an outdated collections practice whose time has come and gone."

But many medical systems still do it, consumer debt experts say, noting that obtaining a complete picture of hospital property liens is impossible.

Land and judgment records are held by thousands of local court clerks, often using separate computer systems. Records are difficult or impossible to obtain in bulk.

"There is not a good nationwide study that I know of that looks at how widespread this is, how many consumers are affected, what's the average size of a lien," said Erin Fuse Brown, a law professor at Georgia State University who studies hospital billing.

Mike Miller and Kitt Klein are among those hoping UVA Health follows VCU Health in canceling thousands of property liens. They fear a $129,000 judgment won by UVA in 2017 against Miller will cost them the equity in their home in Quicksburg, Virginia.

They make about $25,000 a year. Miller, a house painter, was insured but received out-of-network radiation at UVA that doctors said was necessary to treat his lung cancer.

After KHN wrote about his case a year ago, benefits firm WellRithms analyzed his UVA bill and found that a commercial insurer would have paid a little more than $13,000, not $129,000, for the treatment.

"We know all [health care] providers bill a lot, but usually 'a lot' is three to six times what reasonable prices would be," said Jordan Weintraub, vice president of claims for WellRithms. Trying to collect 10 times as much, she said, "is really out there."

UVA Health does not comment on individual patient cases, Swensen said.

KHN found last year that UVA frequently sued patients for far more than what the system could have collected from insurance.

Early this year Miller and Klein emailed UVA President James Ryan, asking for help in reducing or eliminating the judgment. His office phoned in February, saying it would review the case.

"I became very emotional, filled with gratitude," Klein said. "I couldn't talk."

Months went by with no contact. Recently a lawyer from the office of Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring offered to settle the case for $120,000, Klein said, reducing the bill by only $9,000. They don't have the money. Miller's cancer has returned. Interest is mounting at 6%.

University officials do not comment on legal matters or individual cases, a Ryan spokesperson said. Herring's office did not respond to requests for comment.

Jay Hancock: jhancock@kff.org, @JayHancock1

We reached out to the Trump campaign and the White House to ask for more information about Trump's assertion but didn’t receive a response.

This article was published on Thursday, October 15, 2020 in Kaiser Health News.

By Victoria Knight

On Monday, President Donald Trump claimed that the World Health Organization (WHO) “admitted” he was correct that using lockdowns to control the spread of COVID-19 was more damaging than the illness.

In a post on Twitter, Trump wrote: “The World Health Organization just admitted that I was right. Lockdowns are killing countries all over the world. The cure cannot be worse than the problem itself. Open up your states, Democrat governors. Open up New York. A long battle, but they finally did the right thing!”

He reiterated his statement later that night during a campaign rally, saying, “But the World Health Organization, did you see what happened? They just came out a little while ago, and they admitted that Donald Trump was right. The lockdowns are doing tremendous damage to these Democrat-run states, where they’re locked out, sealed up. Suicide rates, drug rates, alcoholism, deaths by so many different forms. You can’t do that.”

Together, the tweet and these comments got considerable attention on social media.

But did the WHO change its stance on lockdowns or concede anything to Trump, as he said it did? Briefly, no.

Since May, Trump has been vocal about asking states to reopen businesses, schools, religious services and other social activities. He also took credit for locking down the U.S. in the early stages of the pandemic, however. And his administration largely delegated lockdown decisions to governors and local governments.

Yet those lockdowns — marked by stay-at-home orders and other restrictions — have been less stringent than those implemented in other countries, said Brooke Nichols, an assistant professor of global health at Boston University.

The “definition has differed country by country and state by state. I would argue that the U.S. has never had an actual enforced lockdown like there have been in some Asian countries and in Italy last spring,” Nichols wrote in an email.

We reached out to the Trump campaign and the White House to ask for more information about Trump’s assertion but didn’t receive a response.

A Clip Doesn’t Tell the Full Story

Although the Trump team didn’t get back to us, we noticed that the Trump War Room Twitter account responded to Trump’s tweet with a link to a video, appearing to back up the president’s claim.

The video is a clip from an Oct. 8 interview with Dr. David Nabarro, a special envoy on COVID-19 for the WHO, by Scottish journalist Andrew Neil. The segment was televised by the British news outlet Spectator TV.

In response to a question about the economic consequences of lockdowns, Nabarro said: “We in the World Health Organization do not advocate lockdowns as the primary means of control of this virus. The only time we believe a lockdown is justified is to buy you time to reorganize, regroup, rebalance your resources; protect your health workers who are exhausted. But by and large, we’d rather not do it.” Nabarro then went on to describe potential economic consequences, including effects on the tourism industry and farmers or the worsening of world poverty.

We checked with Nabarro to find out if the clip accurately reflected the points he raised during a nearly 20-minute interview. He responded, by email: “My comments were taken totally out of context. The WHO position is consistent.”

That context Nabarro mentioned covered a range of topics, such as the estimate that about 90% of the world’s population is still vulnerable to COVID-19, that lockdowns are only an effective pandemic response in extreme circumstances and what Nabarro means when he talks about finding the “middle path.”

“We’re saying we really do have to learn how to coexist with this virus in a way that doesn’t require constant closing down of economies, but at the same time in a way that is not associated with high levels of suffering and death,” Nabarro said in the interview.

To achieve that via the middle-path approach, robust defenses against the virus must be put in place, said Nabarro, including having well-organized public health services, such as testing, contact tracing and isolation. It also involves communities adhering to public health guidelines such as wearing masks, physical distancing and practicing good hygiene.

So, it’s really not accurate for the president to imply that the WHO has or has not supported lockdowns, said Lawrence Gostin, a global health law professor at Georgetown University. It’s not as simple as an either-or choice.

“No one is saying that lockdowns should never be used, just that they shouldn’t be used as a primary or only method,” Gostin wrote in an email.

And Josh Michaud, associate director of global health policy at KFF, said both the WHO and public health experts have acknowledged there are economic consequences to lockdowns. (KHN is an editorially independent program of KFF.)

“Strict lockdowns are best used sparingly and in a time-limited fashion because they can cause negative health and economic consequences,” said Michaud. “That is why Nabarro said lockdowns are not recommended as the ‘primary’ control measure. Critics like to frame lockdowns as being recommended as the only measure, when in reality that is not the case.”

Has the WHO Flipped on Its Stance on Lockdowns?

And what about Trump’s assertion that the WHO had changed its position and admitted he was right?

A member of the WHO media office told us in a statement, “Our position on lockdowns and other severe movement restrictions has been consistent since the beginning. We recognize that they are costly to societies, economies and individuals, but may need to be used if COVID-19 transmission is out of control.”

“WHO has never advocated for national lockdowns as a primary means for controlling the virus. Dr. Nabarro was repeating our advice to governments to ‘do it all,’” the spokesperson said.

To test this premise, we looked at statements by WHO leaders over the course of the pandemic. In the multiple media briefings we reviewed from February onward, the WHO appeared consistent in its messaging about what lockdowns should be deployed for: to give governments time to respond to a high number of COVID-19 cases and get a reprieve for health care workers. Although WHO leaders in February supported the shutting down of the city of Wuhan, China, the presumed source of the COVID-19 outbreak, they have also acknowledged that lockdowns can have serious economic effects, and that robust testing, contact tracing and physical distancing are usually preferable to completely locking down.

There is also no evidence the WHO “admitted” Trump was right about lockdowns.

Our Ruling

Trump tweeted on Monday and then said later that night at a campaign rally that the WHO admitted he was right about lockdowns.

We found no evidence the WHO made this admission. And, based on a review of WHO communications, we found its messaging on the topic has been consistent since the pandemic’s early days.

Trump also appears to have relied on a brief video clip of a wide-ranging interview with WHO special envoy Dr. David Nabarro that didn’t give an accurate portrayal of how Nabarro characterized the use of this intervention.

We rate this statement False.