After the FDA approval, Johnson & Johnson immediately set its sights on the VA, according to emails obtained by ProPublica through the Freedom of Information Act. On March 6, the day after the FDA acted, a company official emailed Deborah Scher, an adviser to VA Secretary Robert Wilkie, from a Spravato launch event, saying, “We have been talking about you and the VA throughout the day.”
A day later, on March 7, Wilkie talked with Johnson & Johnson CEO Alex Gorsky, according to an email between Scher and a company liaison. Scher replied that the VA’s top health official, Richard Stone, was taking charge of getting Spravato into the VA system. “He says this project is well underway,” Scher told the Johnson & Johnson contact. “He has coordinated all of the appropriate leaders from pharmacy, mental health, etc.”
Wilkie had the conversation with Gorsky at the urging of Trump, according to the president’s own account. “I had seen it somewhere, and I’ve read it, regularly, quite a bit about it,” Trump said of Spravato at a White House event on opioids on June 12. “I said, ‘Order — corner the market on it and give it to anybody that has the problem.’”
The White House declined to comment on where Trump saw or read about Spravato. Knewitz, the Johnson & Johnson spokesman, said the company hasn’t discussed the drug with the president.
