Drug Pitched to Trump for Covid-19 Comes From a Deadly Plant

A plant extract trumpeted this week as a “cure” for Covid-19 by the leader of a pillow company is untested and potentially dangerous, scientists say.

Mike Lindell, the chief executive of My Pillow and a big donor to President Trump, told Axios that the president was enthusiastic about the drug, called oleandrin, when he heard about it at a White House meeting last month.

“This thing works — it’s the miracle of all time,” Mr. Lindell, who has a financial stake in the company that makes the compound and sits on its board, said in an interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper on Tuesday. When CBS asked Mr. Trump about oleandrin for Covid-19, Mr. Trump said, “We’ll look at it.”

The unsubstantiated claims alarmed scientists. No studies have shown that oleandrin is safe or effective as a coronavirus treatment. It’s unclear what dose the purported treatment would have, but ingesting even a tiny bit of the toxic shrub the compound comes from could kill you, experts say.

“Don’t mess with this plant,” said Cassandra Leah Quave, a medical ethnobotanist at Emory University.

Oleandrin is derived from Nerium oleander, a lovely, flowering Mediterranean shrub that is popular with landscapers and responsible for many cases of accidental poisoning. Oleandrin is the chemical that makes the plant deadly, Dr. Quave wrote in an article in The Conversation.

Ingesting any part of the plant — or even eating a snail that previously munched on some of its leaves — can cause an irregular heart beat and kill humans and animals, she and other doctors and scientists said. ...