Rudy Giuliani admits he continued traveling to four states for election fraud hearings despite having COVID-19 symptoms as he shows off his breathing machine but claims he's back to '100% health'
Rudy Giuliani has revealed he was showing coronavirus symptoms for several days but continued to travel to four states in five days before he was hospitalized with the disease earlier this week.
The 76-year-old was released from Georgetown University hospital Wednesday after receiving the rare and experimental drug, Remdesivir, and being treated in part by Dr. Sean Conley, the physician to the president.
Giuliani, who has been heading Trump's legal effort to overturn the election results, spoke about his time in the hospital and his recovery from coronavirus in an new episode on his YouTube channel on Friday.
He also demonstrated the breathing machine he is still required to use, despite claiming he is now back to '100% health', stating to his viewers that ‘you may have to use it someday'.
The former New York City Mayor claimed that despite continuing to travel while showing symptoms for the virus, he would not change how he has responded to the outbreak, claiming that ‘it’s not a nice disease, you don’t want to get it’ but that it shouldn’t stop people from leaving their homes.
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Rudy Giuliani demonstrated the breathing machine he is still required to use during Friday's video, despite claiming he is now back to '100% health' after his bout with coronavirus
During the video, Giuliani urged Americans to be diagnosed as early as possible if they start to show symptoms but admitted that he did not do the same.
‘I’m not going to say I passed that test completely,’ he began.
‘A couple of times I did because a couple of times I was exposed and immediately, within one day, I went for a test reported my symptoms to a doctor.
‘But this time though, I had symptoms, I probably did have symptoms for a few days, I was traveling, I was traveling very fast and going to one state after another testifying at the hearings concerning the election.
WHAT IS REGENERON'S ANTIBODY COCKTAIL?
Regeneron's drug 'cocktail,' REGN-COV2, contains an antibody made by the company from mice and another isolated from a recovered COVID-19 patient, each of which may help to neutralize coronavirus.
The firm's latest data from the ongoing trials, show the drug drove down the viral loads of patients who were not hospitalized and cut their recovery times by nearly half.
But it's very much an experimental treatment, and the data announced earlier this week are the first published from the trial.
Two patients treated with the antibody cocktail had 'adverse events' - undesirable side effects. One of those was a 'serious' adverse event, but Regeneron did not reveal details of what happened to the patient, who received a low dose of the drug.
REGN-COV2 is comprised of a duo of therapeutics in a class of drugs known as monoclonal antibodies (hence REGN-COV2's distinction as a 'polyclonal antibody'), which are clones of antibody that attacks a specific antigen.
‘I had gone in 5 days to 4 states - Pennsylvania, to Michigan, to Arizona and to Georgia - and about five to six hearings in that period of time, preparing witnesses,’ he added, saying that it had been ‘very stressful’ because they were allegedly being threatened.
‘The whole anti-Trump thing has become a horrible sickness, eating away at the soul of many people. It's encouraging them to threaten to kill and take away jobs, destroy families of people who just testify they saw cheating,’ Giuliani continued.
He said that by the middle of last week he was feeling worn down but failed to call a doctor until he was told he looked pale while doing his radio show on Sunday.
A test showed he had low blood oxygen and he was then hospitalized after being told to do so by his son Andrew and President Trump’s doctor.
‘Thank goodness they did,’ he said. ‘When I got admitted, I had shortness of breath, fever, mild cough.’
The former mayor revealed that X-rays showed he had pneumonia and that he was placed on oxygen before taking four days of Remdesivir and one day of a monoclonal antibody treatment manufactured by Regeneron.
Only about 200,000 doses of the experimental antibody treatment have been provided to U.S. hospitals, according to Health and Human Services Department data.
Trump, former New Jersey Governor and Trump aide Chris Christie and Health and Human Services Secretary Ben Carson were all also treated with emergency antibody treatments after contracting coronavirus.
Questions are being asked around why Trump and his friends are able to easily access COVID-19 treatments that are not readily available to the American public.
In D.C., where Giuliani got treated, only 108 doses have been distributed. D.C. currently has 24,000 cases, and has suffered more than 700 deaths.
Despite Remdesivir also still being an experimental drug and him having to seek special approval to take it, Giuliani said that he was ‘willing to take the risk’.
Giuliani wore a mask for part of the video but still claimed that are excessive at times
A masked Rudy Giuliani flashed a thumb's up as he left hospital on Wednesday
‘I recovered the doctor thought it was almost miraculous how fast I recovered,’ he claimed.
‘From the first day to the second day there was remarkable recovery. By the third day I was just about fully recovered and on the fourth day, I was able to leave. Now it's the end of the fifth day and I feel 100%.’
Giuliani does, however, still need to ‘expand’ his breathing by using a machine, which he demonstrated by telling his viewers ‘you may have to use it someday’.
‘It helps a lot, I've tripled my ability with that,' he claimed. 'It makes me feel very good. I probably have more energy now than I did before I went in and I’m very thankful for the care.’
In particular, he thanked Dr. Conley, saying that the White House Doctor 'stayed in touch and helped him'.
Although Giuliani worked decades ago for the federal government and is the former mayor of New York, he has no official government position. He served as Trump's personal attorney during impeachment and has traveled the country seeking to overturn the result in states that went for Joe Biden.
Those travels took him to at least three battleground states in the week before his coronavirus test hit.
In his video Friday, Giuliani claimed that despite his hospital stay, his work on the attempts to overthrow the election results continued with the help of his son and that he had returned to a hearing that morning with another one scheduled for Saturday.
Rudy Giuliani appears at a hearing in Michigan unmasked just days before his diagnosis
'I missed a little but haven’t missed too much,' he said, claiming that he still wouldn't advise people to quarantine too much, claiming that Democrats were trying to spark fear in Americans with 'excessive panic and hysteria'.
'I quarantined in the sense that stayed in a lot,' Giuliani said.
'I don’t go to restaurants and I didn’t go flying around all over the place but I also didn’t stay in a basement and lock myself out of life for the past eight months.
'If I did, I don’t know what I would have done to myself and I see the damage that has been done to this country.
'If it was ever necessary, it is no longer necessary, a shutdown of this country is no longer necessary,' Giuliani continued.
Antibody drugs from Eli Lilly and Regeneron are in short supply with some hospitals giving them out by a lottery as there is nowhere near enough but were received by Giuliani
'The shutdown now will do more damage than covid will do. We have treatment for the china virus. The treatments are getting better, the fatalities are dropping and dropping and dropping,' he claimed, despite the US surpassing 3,000 deaths just two days ago and setting a new record for daily fatalities.
'It’s not a nice disease, you don’t want to get it,' Giuliani continued, 'but you don’t want to get flu either, you don’t want to get TB, you don’t want to get hit by a car, or hit by a brick.
'You don’t want to get cancer... but you don’t stay in your house and shut down the American economy because of it. You go about your life with courage.
'Part of the courage that America has is to take risks'.
Giuliani also branded Democrats 'insecure' people as he claimed that they were making a mess of the cities that they control.
'It's why we have the disaster called California, the disaster called New York and if this election doesn’t work out right, the disaster we call the United States.'
'I will remember to remind people to be cautious, wear a mask where necessary,' Giuliani said of his coronavirus advice.
'But also willing to warn people not to overdo it, not to let fear overtake the great courage of the American people, not to let fear of any disease, particularly one thrust on us by China, to stop us from growing and growing as Americans, from doing what we want to do and what we have to do and what’s necessary for us to do.
'I'm wary of this whole excessive panic and the hysteria caused which has really eroded many of our sacred rights that have to be fought back for,' he added.
'We went too quickly like sheep to the slaughter. We gave up Palm Sunday, the high holy days, Easter Sunday. We gave up some of our right to speak out that things were too excessive incase we would be yelled down as stupid and mean and ignorant.'
'We allowed complete censorship come into our election, censorship of crimes that are now going to come out and haunt us for years, crimes that are big and substantial and frightening to the security of the US.'
The Supreme Court declined to take the case Trump called 'the big one'
Just hours after Giuliani published the latest video, he and the Trump campaign were dealt yet another blow after the Supreme Court reject the Texas Attorney General's bid to overturn the election in four states that went for Joe Biden.
The court voted 7-2 to dismiss the case. Justice Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito said they would have heard the case - but that they would have refused to overturn the election result effectively making the result 9-0.
The stunning end to Trump's legal bid to overturn the election came just after 6.30pm in a one-page ruling from the court.
'Texas has not demonstrated a judicially cognizable interest in the manner in which another State conducts its elections,' the ruling said – refusing to even take up a case that legal scholars had already ripped as a legal farce.
Trump had called the case 'the big one,' and tweeted a series of messages designed to push the court to rule in his favor.
Now, with the high court dismissing the high-profile effort – the mother of all the 'Kraken' lawsuits – he is without an avenue to overturn the election he calls 'rigged' despite dozens of lower courts ruling against allied efforts.
The president sought to intervene in the case – and 126 Republican House members followed suit, while 17 states signed a friend of the court brief supporting the Texas suit.
That didn't stop the four states being sued, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Georgia, from blasting the suit as 'legally indefensible and is an affront to principles of constitutional democracy.'
But the majority found that Texas lacked 'standing' to even bring the case.
It also had not demonstrated a 'judiciably cognizable interest in the manner in which another state conducts elections.'
In other word, its legal argument failed to justify why it was justified in having a court consider it's objections to how another state chose to run its elections.
Nationwide, 15.7 million people have been infected by the coronavirus and more than 293,000 Americans have died.