Why Did President Trump Get an mRNA COVID-19 Shot? 

David Gortler / Jay Richards /

On Oct. 10, President Donald Trump’s physician, Dr. Sean P. Barbabella, announced that after conducting a battery of tests, he found that the president “remains in exceptional health” and that he had received “immunizations, including annual influenza and updated COVID 19 booster vaccinations.” It’s likely the president received one of the mRNA shots from Pfizer.

A letter from President Trump's physician,
Figure 1: Letter from Trump’s personal physician

Trump—perhaps the busiest man on the planet—can’t be expected to do a deep dive on the epidemiology, safety, and efficacy of these shots. Like most patients, he had no choice but to trust the experts.

That policy makes sense when the experts are trustworthy and follow the evidence. Unfortunately, when it comes to public health, and to the COVID-19 mandates in particular, trust in public health agencies and health care professionals has been shattered beyond recognition. 

So much of what people think they know about America’s drugs and approvals just isn’t so. As a result, we doubt the president of the United States received a full disclosure of the available data so he could weigh the risks versus the benefits of mRNA COVID-19 shots.

To exercise truly informed consent, he would have needed to know at least the following.

In layman’s terms, this means that if the president were to catch the flu or COVID-19 again (he has had COVID-19 at least once), it would be mild. He could easily treat it with very safe drugs such as ivermectin and the hydroxychloroquine that he correctly advocated, and stockpiled, along with dozens of other repurposed, inexpensive treatments for COVID-19 proven to be safe and effective as the peer-reviewed literature has clearly outlined: 

Chart showing HDQ for COVID-19
Chart showing "Ivermectin for COVID-19"

The Risks of mRNA COVID Shots

So much for the benefits. What about the risks?

VAERS chart showing injury reports from vaccines
Figure 2: August 2025 reports from VAERS showing the number of adverse events associated with COVID-19 mRNA vaccines in the USA alone. Various sources indicate that this voluntary report only represents the low, single-digit percentage of adverse events that occur in reality.
Page from heavily redacted FDA report.
Figure 3: Want to analyze the quantity and ingredients in your mRNA COVID-19 shot? Here is one page of the 63 of 127 pages that was not totally redacted that the FDA has selected to share about how to do that.

Long story short: The mRNA shots are far riskier and have far fewer net benefits than the public was led to believe. What’s more, both the FDA and the drug companies have chosen, over and over again, a policy opacity over transparency.

Of course, it’s impractical for a pharmacist or physician to read out every single side effect of every single drug, but COVID-19 mRNA shots are a special case.

Unlike every other product on the market, vaccine recipients can’t sue vaccine manufacturers in case of injury or death. Add to that the profound lack of transparency on some the most basic ingredients of these new and experimental drugs.

In light of these facts, providers have a duty to fully inform patients of risks and benefits. (In fact, the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1990 and 1993 seem to require this.)

On Sept. 1, Trump said over Truth Social that he wants to know if drug companies are telling him the truth about the mRNA shots. We hope someone in the president’s circle will tell him.