- The claim that U.S. President Donald Trump aide Natalie Harp is a cancer survivor cannot be independently verified by Snopes. Because Snopes looks for primary sourcing and evidence to rate our claims, we are leaving this claim unrated.
- The rumor stems from social media posts criticizing a senator for referencing Harp while mocking Trump in August 2026. These posts said Harp was a cancer survivor, while other posts argued there’s no proof of that claim.
- The claim that Harp had cancer is based on her own accounts of her experience battling a rare bone cancer, which she wrote and spoke about in 2019 and 2020. In Harp’s account, she was told she’d have to wait for certain treatment options to be approved before she could continue treatment after failing two chemotherapies and being rejected from a clinical trial for an investigational drug. Harp credits Trump’s right-to-try law, signed during his first term, for enabling her to be treated with an FDA-approved immunotherapy drug that wasn’t approved for use in treating her cancer.
- Based on the available evidence, much of Harp’s experience, as told by her, is realistic and believable. Bone cancers in general are rare and often resistant to chemotherapies. Immunotherapy drugs, which are still relatively new and frequently researched, are a promising possible treatment for many bone cancers. Many such treatments are not yet approved for use for treating bone cancers because the cancers are rare and difficult to treat.
- However, there are a few details, largely in her descriptions of cause and effect, that could potentially be inaccurate, based on our research. For example, she credits Trump’s right-to-try law for saving her life, when her description of the drug that finally made a difference for her better aligns with a drug that she would’ve been able to access through an FDA system that has existed for decades.
- Snopes reached out to the White House by email to ask if it could share details about Harp’s history with cancer that could potentially be verifiable, such as the name of the drug used in her treatment. The White House did not answer our questions.
In August 2026, news reporting about one of U.S. President Donald Trump’s aides, Natalie Harp, intensified, particularly after Sen. Jon Ossoff , D-Ga., referenced her in criticism of Trump, drawing increased attention to the once little-known aide.
Many conservative figures then criticized Ossoff for referencing Harp, who they said was a cancer survivor, in his attacks on Trump. For example, one X post (archived) said, “Harp is a 35-year-old cancer survivor who works in the White House. Ossoff chose to make her part of an anti-Trump attack because he thought it would score points with the Democrat base and generate attention.”
The claim surfaced elsewhere on X (archived) and Facebook (archived). Other social media posts (archived) cast doubt on whether Harp ever really had cancer. Some Snopes readers searched the site or sent emails asking whether it was true that Harp was a cancer survivor.
Harp first rose to fame by sharing her account of suffering from Stage 2 bone cancer and how a Trump-signed “right-to-try” law apparently saved her life. Snopes cannot independently verify Harp’s account and medical history, so we’re unable to rate this claim true or false.
However, we can compare the details of Harp’s account with the current medical research available to get a sense of which details, if any, may sound unrealistic in her story.
Harp’s account
Harp’s claims about her history with bone cancer came from a LinkedIn blog post she wrote and an interview with Fox News in June 2019, as well as a speech she gave at the Republican National Convention in August 2020.
The LinkedIn post, her earliest public description of her experience with cancer, didn’t give any details about the specific cancer she was diagnosed with except that it was rare.
She shared slightly more detail two days later in her appearance on Fox News. Brian Kilmeade, co-host of “Fox & Friends,” opened the interview (0:04) by saying Harp had Stage 2 cancer. Harp went on to say her illness was terminal (2:10), Kilmeade Said Harp had Stage 2 of a rare bone cancer (2:18) and Harp confirmed she was “the youngest person in this rare bone cancer” she had (2:52).
The cancer diagnosis is not where Harp has begun any of her accounts, however; instead, she has frequently highlighted a medical error she suffered before that.
“On November 9, 2015 — a year to the day Donald Trump would win the presidency — a nurse mixed up my IV with the deadly substance of sterile water leaving me housebound and searching for care,” Harp wrote on LinkedIn. She said her physicians offered her medications for managing pain and even Death With Dignity instead of diagnosing her condition.
On Fox News, she said it took two years for doctors to figure out what was wrong with her. Harp also said in that interview that this medical error is one that “no one has survived” (0:52). At the Republican National Convention, Harp said (0:38) she was a victim of a “notoriously deadly medical error,” but survived “only to be diagnosed with a rare and terminal bone cancer.” Harp then presented the care she was offered afterwards, which is in contrast to her other accounts in which she described receiving these offerings prior to diagnosis of the cancer.
Notably, the web article Fox News published alongside the video of the interview said Harp “has battled stage 2 bone cancer for most of her life,” even though the above descriptions make it sound like her struggles with the cancer developed in the several years prior to that interview.
In all of her accounts, Harp described the available chemotherapies failing to address her cancer and being denied participation in clinical trials. At the Republican National Convention, she claimed (1:22) that no one wanted her in their clinical trials because she’d “make them look bad” after failing the chemotherapies.
Harp said her doctor told her she’d have to suffer through symptoms for either several more months (LinkedIn) or more than a year (Fox News interview, 2:43) for the next round of FDA approvals for the clinical trial drugs she was denied.
She wrote that her doctor did not tell her she had other options, so she went to another doctor who was willing to try a different approach: prescribing an FDA-approved immunotherapy drug for an unapproved use. She credits that experimental treatment for her recovery, and Trump’s Right to Try Act for that treatment even though she acknowledged that some may argue it was repetitive of existing law.
Snopes emailed the White House to ask if it could share more verifiable details about Harp’s experience, such as which unapproved drug was used in her treatment, but
Right-to-try law
The right-to-try law Harp credits for saving her life essentially allows patients to access drugs without FDA approval for treatment in specific circumstances. According to the law’s text, an eligible patient can consent to the use of an “eligible investigational drug” that has completed a Phase 1 clinical trial and “has not been approved or licensed for any use.” The drug manufacturer is allowed to decide it won’t permit the patient to access the unapproved drug.
A contradiction between the law and Harp’s story immediately jumps out. The right-to-try law applies specifically to drugs that have not been approved for any use, but Harp claimed her lifesaving treatment was an FDA-approved immunotherapy drug being used for an unapproved use.
Such a drug could still theoretically be used to treat Harp’s condition under a different process that existed prior to the Right to Try Act: expanded access. Expanded access also allows patients who have exhausted all other treatment options for a serious or life-threatening condition to use an investigational drug instead. Investigational drugs eligible for use in expanded access have not been approved by the FDA “for their specific use.”
FDA researchers wrote that the agency has been facilitating access to investigational drugs since the 1970s, and regulations describing the pathways to accessing these unapproved drugs have existed since 1987.
A chart by Triage Cancer, a nonprofit organization focused on practical and legal issues that may affect cancer patients, both expanded access and right-to-try require a physician and the drug manufacturer to approve a request to use an unapproved drug. Expanded access also requires approval from the Institutional Review Board and the FDA, which right to try does not.
FDA data says that between fiscal years 2019 and 2023, the FDA approved anywhere between 97.1% to 100% of expanded access requests, depending on the year and the type of request.
Harp’s description of events suggests that her physician, and potentially drug manufacturers, would not approve her request for expanded access. Such obstacles would also to be an issue for Harp under the right-to-try law; based on her story, it sounds like Harp became able to use an unapproved drug treatment because she got a new doctor, not because of the new law.
Comparing Harp’s story to actual research
While Harp’s story may be vague on specifics such as names and dates, it does have enough details to compare it to reality.
In 2008, the Pennsylvania Patient Safety Authority reported that bags of sterile water were being mistaken for IV solutions because of similar appearance, and that these mistakes were capable of causing serious harm to patients, sometimes even killing them.
It’s unclear whether Harp suggested that such a medical error led to the development of her cancer, but in any case, Snopes could find no evidence that such a mistake could cause cancer. According to the Pennsylvania Patient Safety Authority, the IV error is dangerous is because sterile water can cause red blood cells to break down too soon.
Based on the report’s description of a patient who survived the sterile water injection, others have survived the medical error that Harp claimed no one else had survived. The less-extreme version of Harp’s claim, in which she calls the error “notoriously deadly,” is accurate.
Bone cancers are rare in general, and there are many different specific kinds of bone cancers. The American Cancer Society even suggests seeking out clinical trials because these cancers are rare and difficult to treat.
In fact, the University College London wrote that bone cancers are frequently resistant to chemotherapy. The American Cancer Society says that “in recent years” researchers have developed non-chemo drugs, including immunotherapy drugs, to help treat some bone cancers.
The Cancer Research Institute says that while surgery is often the main treatment method for early-stage bone cancers, immunotherapies may be used in treating more advanced or far-reaching forms of the cancer.
The FDA first approved an immune checkpoint inhibitor, the kind of immunotherapy drug often used for treating these cancers, in 2011, according to the Osteosarcoma Institute. (Osteosarcoma is a type of bone cancer.) The institute says no new treatment options for the cancer have been approved in 40 years.
The research above does suggest that much of Harp’s story about her battle with cancer is plausible. Bone cancers are rare, so it’s expected that whatever kind of bone cancer she’d have would be rare itself. Many bone cancers are resistant to chemotherapy, which would explain why Harp failed such treatments twice.
It also makes sense that the unapproved treatment she and her doctor tried would be an immunotherapy drug. Cancer research organizations point to immunotherapy drugs as a promising avenue for treating some forms of bone cancer. New immunotherapy treatments are still emerging today, and so it wouldn’t be surprising if the drug wasn’t yet approved 10 years ago.
On top of all of that, the rarity of bone cancers can make it difficult for emerging treatments to be tested with large enough sample sizes in trials to quickly move through the approval process.
For further reading, Snopes has recently fact-checked a number of claims about Harp, including whether an image of her and Trump in a helicopter is authentic.
