US President Donald Trump said on Sunday he would help the creator of the Dilbert comic strip get treated for metastatic prostate cancer after the cartoonist directly appealed to him on social media.
“On it,” Trump replied in a brief social media post after cartoonist Scott Adams posted he would ask Trump for help getting his healthcare provider, Kaiser Permanente of Northern California, to schedule his treatment with the targeted radiotherapy drug Pluvicto.
“I am declining fast,” Adams wrote on X.
“The treatment “will give me a fighting chance to stick around on this planet a bit longer.”
Adams said Kaiser Permanente had approved his application to receive Pluvicto but had “dropped the ball” in scheduling his intravenous infusion.
Kaiser Permanente said Adams’ oncology team “is working closely with him on the next steps in his cancer care.”
It said since the drug’s approval, it had treated more than 150 patients with the drug in Northern California.
“We know the drug and the disease,” it said.
The White House did not respond to queries about help for Adams, who has been a vocal Trump supporter over the past several years.
Secretary of health and human services Robert F Kennedy also responded on social media: “The president wants to help.”
Swiss drugmaker Novartis, which makes Pluvicto, said last month the drug reduced the risk of progression or death in patients with prostate cancer by 28%. Pluvicto is part of a class of drugs that combines cell-killing radioactive particles with molecules that attach themselves to tumours.
The Dilbert comic strip was first published in 1989 and ran for decades. At its peak it was one of the most widely circulated comic strips in the US, but many newspapers dropped it in 2023 after a racist rant by Adams appeared on YouTube.
Adams called black Americans a “hate group” and suggested white Americans “get the hell away from black people,” in response to a conservative organisation’s poll purporting to show many black Americans do not think it is OK to be white.
He later said his comments were intended as hyperbole and he disavowed racists, while media reports had ignored the context of his comments.
Reuters
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