This article in STAT, the invaluable health site, gets right to the point of what went wrong with the Trump administration’s response:
What’s missing is an appreciation of the value of data, and humanity’s mastery of it, as the one weapon we have against an out-of-control virus. The desire to ignore the epidemic and the one to embrace would-be treatments before they’re proven boils down to the same thing: the desire to believe that you can force the world into being fixed without understanding it first. There is no debate that medicines are needed, but we need to make sure we find the right ones.
“The desire to believe that you can force the world into being fixed without understanding it first ” is a perfect description of Donald Trump. In this case, Trump has been persuaded by Laura Ingraham and Dr. Oz that he’s found a miracle vaccine/cure that will win him re-election and since he has no understanding of well … anything, he’s going along with it.
The right’s anti-science wing, led by the conservative evangelicals and cynically used by big business and industry to prevent any mitigation of their destructive contribution found a leader who would believe anything if presented as a benefit to him personally. (Big businessmen certainly believe in science themselves — they depend upon it to make progress in their own industries.)
STAT has produced a good fact check of the Hydroxychloroquine issue, here. It’s infuriating that so much time, energy and money is being spent on this one issue. It may turn out to have some benefit. Nothing so far indicates it’s anything close to a panacea even in the best case scenario. It’s just that the Emperor has decided this is his “fix” and that’s that.