Trump said today that he was just responding to a sarcastic reporter’s question when he directed his scientists to “look into” using UV light inside the body and injecting disinfectant to clean the lungs. It would be a big relief if that were true because it would mean the man in charge isn’t so dumb that he has forced disinfectant companies to issue warnings not to drink their product. during this pandemic.
But it isn’t.
It’s a bald-faced lie.
He was not responding to any question. He brought it up himself and he told the scientists sitting there he expected them to follow up:
As far as whether or not that stray comment will have any effect, here’s that Vanity Fair article about the Trump administration’s big hydroxychloroquine plan I mentioned in my Salon column this morning. People should be fired for this — starting with the president. And Laura Ingraham, Sean Hannity and Fox News should be sued for millions:
Forget testing, ventilators, and PPE. Donald Trump’s big plan to beat COVID-19 involved distributing millions of doses of an unproven drug. Behind the scenes, senior administration officials pushed hard to bend the rules and back up his boasts.
On the afternoon of Saturday, April 4, President Trump stood at the White House podium and escalated his marketing blitz on behalf of hydroxychloroquine, hyping the old malaria drug’s alleged promise in treating COVID-19, as well as his administration’s success in acquiring huge amounts of it.
“We have millions and millions of doses of it—29 million to be exact,” he said, as the official tally of COVID-19 cases in the U.S. topped 260,000 and governors across the country pleaded for federal support to acquire tests, ventilators, and protective gear for health care workers. “We’re just hearing really positive stories, and we’re continuing to collect the data.” That evening, according to emails obtained by Vanity Fair, Trump’s political appointees would ramp up the pressure on career health officials to make good on the president’s extravagant promises, despite clear warnings from federal clinicians about the risks and unproven benefits of chloroquine-based treatments for COVID-19.
Vanity Fair has assembled this account based on documents and interviews provided by multiple federal officials with knowledge of internal Trump administration proceedings.
The president had been touting hydroxychloroquine for weeks, sparking worldwide shortages of the drug and prompting negotiations with Indian prime minister Narendra Modi to lift export restrictions on its active ingredients. But on March 24, the federal government’s top interagency working group of clinicians and scientists privately threw cold water on his claims, according to a federal official with knowledge of the working group’s deliberations. In an internal consensus statement, a medical countermeasures group within Health and Human Services recommended that chloroquine-based COVID-19 treatments should be studied only in controlled, hospital-based clinical trials, as their safety and efficacy was “not supported by data from reliable clinical trials or from non-human primates” and carried “potential risks.” The medicines—which are used to treat malaria as well as autoimmune conditions such as lupus—can have serious side effects, including heart arrhythmias.
And yet, just hours after that April 4 press conference, White House officials pushed ahead with a massive behind-the-scenes pressure campaign on the government’s top health officials to deliver huge amounts of chloroquine drugs to just about anyone who wanted them, according to documents reviewed by Vanity Fair. That night, Brett Giroir, the assistant secretary for health in the Department of Health and Human Services, sent an email with the subject line “Hydroxychloroquine” to a group including FEMA administrator Pete Gaynor, HHS assistant secretary for preparedness and response Robert Kadlec, and Navy Rear Admiral John Polowczyk, who leads a supply-chain task force at FEMA.
The email read:
WH call. Really want to flood Ny and NJ with treatment courses. Hospitals have it. Sick out patients don’t. And can’t get. So go through distribution channels as we discussed. If we have 29 million perhaps send a few million ASAP? WH wants follow up in AM.
We can get a lot more of this. Right Bob? Millions per week?
The emails indicate that the administration’s top health officials were closely involved in a frenzied effort to make unproven chloroquine treatments widely available, even though the FDA’s new emergency rule limited distribution of the drug as a COVID-19 treatment to hospitalized patients. One hour after the first email, Gaynor replied to Kadlec, Giroir, and Polowczyk, seeming to suggest that FDA commissioner Stephen Hahn was on board with expanding COVID-19 patients’ access to the drug: “Hahn asked to distribute to hospitals and the drug stores.”
In a second email that appears to have been sent the same night, Gaynor indicated that he was working closely with Rear Admiral Polowczyk: “Me and Adm P are on it. More to follow in the am.”
The rest of the story is just stunning. He had the entire government running in circles to make Trump’s magical thinking come true. It’s hard to know the costs of this inane bootlicking project, but it certainly took time and energy away from the professionals dealing with the pandemic for no good reason. It’s not as if the government had nothing else to do — or the response was going well on other fronts.
And what are the chances this is the only time the political appointees of Donald Trump were influencing/pushing/demanding that government experts follow the daft directives of this fucking moron.
They were trying to put this drug out there for people to be able to get on their own from pharmacies, overruling the scientific experts who objected strenuously.
Look what’s happened today:
The Food and Drug Administration warned consumers Friday against taking malaria drugs chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine to treat Covid-19 outside a hospital or formal clinical trial setting after “serious” poisoning and deaths were reported.
The agency said it became aware of reports of “serious heart rhythm problems” in patients with the virus who were treated with the malaria drugs, often in combination with antibiotic azithromycin, commonly known as a Z-Pak. It also warned physicians against prescribing the drugs to treat the coronavirus outside of a hospital.
“Hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine can cause abnormal heart rhythms such as QT interval prolongation and a dangerously rapid heart rate called ventricular tachycardia,” the agency wrote in the notice. “We will continue to investigate risks associated with the use of hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine for COVID-19 and communicate publicly when we have more information.”
And if anyone’s still wondering where Trump got this:
Fox News host Laura Ingraham and two doctors who frequently appear on her show met with President Trump last Friday [April 3] to advocate for an unproven anti-malarial drug as a treatment for the novel coronavirus, The Washington Post reported on Monday. Just two days later, the president asserted that “a lot of people are saying” that the drug should be used to treat coronavirus patients.
This whole thing came out of the right wing fever swamps.
I keep thinking I can’t be shocked anymore, he manages to do it. It’s quite a talent.