(Reuters) -U.S. President Donald Trump said on Sunday he would help the creator of the “Dilbert” comic strip get treated for his 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 that 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 little 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 in a statement that Adams’ oncology team “is working closely with him on the next steps in his cancer care, which are already underway.”
It added that, since the drug’s approval, it had treated more than 150 patients with the drug in Northern California. “We know this drug and this 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 that 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 tumors.
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 United States, 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 organization’s poll purporting to show that many African Americans do not think it is OK to be white.
He later said that his comments were intended as hyperbole and that he disavowed racists, while media reports had ignored the context of his comments.
(Reporting by Kristina Cooke in San Francisco; Editing by Sergio Non and Edmund Klamann)
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