An insider who was in the Oval Office when a man collapsed as President Donald Trump announced lower costs for weight loss drugs is shedding light on what Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was doing during the incident.
Clips from the Thursday, Nov. 6 press conference quickly went viral, showing the Health and Human Services Secretary appearing to leave the room as others rushed to help.
Kennedy was criticized online for seeming to “flee the scene” while Dr. Mehmet Oz, head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, helped catch the man as he fell. With assistance from others, Oz laid the man down as Kennedy walked away and another person mentioned getting a chair.
A source present at the event said that “three doctors” were around the man when he collapsed, while Eli Lilly CEO Dave Ricks was speaking. According to the insider, Kennedy initially thought the man just needed to sit down.
:max_bytes(150000):strip_icc():focal(749x0:751x2):format(webp)/oval-office-medical-emergency-1-110625-d183c4b51cba4b94acdfbb1df36a8dae.jpg)
“He went into the other room and got a chair because when [the man] first started falling, he thought maybe he just needed to sit,” the source said. “He went back and got a wet towel and came over when [the man] was on the floor. When they were first propping him up, Kennedy ran in the other room and got a chair for him.”
White House deputy press secretary Kush Desai defended Kennedy on X, replying to a post that criticized him for leaving the room.
“The Secretary rushed to get medical assistance while others tended to the man, you ghoul,” Desai wrote.
The source described the man who fainted as being in “pretty bad shape.” Although conscious, “his heart rate looked normal, but his blood pressure was in the tank,” the insider said. “He tried to sit up for a while but was definitely pale, so they laid him down again and then took him out on a gurney.”
:max_bytes(150000):strip_icc():focal(749x0:751x2):format(webp)/donald-trump-oval-office-medical-emergency-110625-0c5075d0534148adba8475ed4513ff19.jpg)
After the incident, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told the press pool that the man was doing “okay” and that the conference would resume. Once it restarted, Trump addressed what had happened, saying, “One of the representatives of one of the companies got a little light-headed and so they went down, and he’s fine. He’s got doctor’s care, but he’s fine. So we had a little bit of an interruption. Sorry for that.”
Although Getty Images initially identified the man as Gordon Findlay, global brand director for Novo Nordisk, the company later confirmed to multiple outlets that Findlay was not present at the event.
