Month: April 2020

Polling:

Health concerns still take precedence over economic concerns by a wide margin for Americans in their views on when to re-open the economy — both in what they want for the nation, and in what they’d do themselves. Many say they need to be confident the outbreak is over before returning to public places, and big majorities of all partisans agree the stay-at-home orders are effective.

The health concerns may be so salient that even for those whose finances have been impacted and even for those concerned about job loss, most of them still worry the country will open up too fast.

Sixty-three percent of Americans are more worried about restrictions lifting too fast and worsening the outbreak —than worry about lifting restrictions too slowly and worsening the economy.

And what would Americans actually do if restrictions were lifted right now? Would anyone show up to public places or would they be too worried about health risks? That could be the most important factor in the economy.

Only 13% say they would definitely return to public places over the next few weeks if restrictions were lifted right now, regardless of what else happened with the outbreak.

Almost half — 48% — say they would not return to public places until they were confident the outbreak was over. Another 39% are “maybes”: they’d return depending on whether they saw the outbreak getting better.

These views are not decidedly partisan: most Republicans are “maybes” at best, as are most Democrats and independents.

Small numbers for specific things:

• Only 13% would be comfortable going to a large sports or entertainment event.
• Only 15% would be comfortable getting on an airplane.
• 29% would be comfortable going to restaurants or bars.

Under half —44% — would be comfortable going to a workplace outside the home, though among those who are currently employed, 57% would be comfortable.

Most would be comfortable visiting friends.

Asked to directly prioritize two tough choices for the nation, health also wins by a roughly similar two-to-one margin. Seventy percent of Americans say keeping people home and social distancing should continue to be the nation’s top priority — even if it means the economy is hurt in the short term — and 30% say to send people back to work even if that means increased health risks. But that number has moved, even as it remains a large majority. It was 83% who prioritized staying home three weeks ago.

Underpinning all of this is are at least two key factors:

First, most don’t think the virus will be contained for at least a few more months — in fact, fewer people believe the virus will be contained soon than thought so roughly a month ago. And most still don’t think the fight against the virus is going well.

Second, many Americans tell us that despite the concern about the economy and their own finances, they think they can last at least a few more weeks before the financial effects of the outbreak hit them.

Forty-one percent think they can go on at least another few weeks before finances become a problem, and another 17% don’t think they’ll be affected. There are one-third who say they’ve already been impacted — but even for them, most say they’re more concerned the country will open up too fast, and say the nation’s priority should be to slow the virus.

Meanwhile most Americans think stay-at-home orders around the country are working, a view that cuts across party lines. Three in four say that the measures so far are effective when it comes to limiting the spread of the virus nationwide, including large percentages of Democrats, Republicans, and independents.

Most Americans say their state’s governor should make the decisions about whether to reopen the economy in their area, rather than President Trump, or their local county or city officials.

And most say widespread testing is a necessity for doing so.

Republicans, too, would rather the decision go to their governor than to the president.

Most Americans also feel widespread testing is necessary before the opening up the country, though partisan differences are more pronounced on that. Most Democrats and independents think testing is needed. Republicans are less likely to think so.

Overall, Americans give their state and local officials in general higher marks for handling the coronavirus than Donald Trump.

More than two-thirds of Americans think their state and local officials are doing a good job, while fewer than half think the same of Donald Trump.

Views of the president’s overall handling of the outbreak remain under half at 48%, little changed from two weeks ago after starting off last month in positive territory.

Positive assessments for state and local officials cut across party lines. But partisan divisions remain stark when assessing the president: 55% of Republicans say he is doing a very good job, 69% of Democrats say he is doing a very bad one. Independents are split.

Overall, most continue to think things are going badly for the U.S. in its effort to deal with the outbreak, and those assessments are also similar to two weeks ago. Most also see months to go — not weeks — before the nation has it under control.

A majority of Americans (62%) oppose the protesters who have been in state capitals recently calling for lifting of state lockdowns; by nearly three to one Americans oppose, rather than support them.

Slightly more Republicans oppose them than support them, too.

Ideologically, it is only the very conservative (not moderates nor the somewhat conservative) among whom the protesters find majority support – and even there, it’s 6 in 10.

Very few Americans – only 7% – feel President Trump should encourage these protests. Only 13% of Republicans think he should encourage them. In fact, only a quarter of people who support the protesters think the president should encourage the protests.

These views come as many Americans are still concerned about potentially getting the virus, and say the priority for the country should be continuing the stay-at-home orders even over the economy.

There’s more at the link.

All these businesspeople who are exhorting Trump to “open up the economy” and manipulating the Fox News nitwits to go out and play Russian Roulette apparently fail to understand that most Americans don’t have the same death wish.

The depth of the administration’s cynicism recalls the Big Daddy line from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, “I detect the powerful odor of mendacity.” – Louis Dubose, co-author with Molly Ivins of Bushwhacked: Life in George W. Bush’s America, speaking to the Austin Chronicle, 2003.

Don’t let these people near Washington, Molly Ivins warned when former Texas Gov. George W. Bush ran for president. They’ll do to the country what they did to Texas.

If she’d lived long enough to see the Trump administration, it would look eerily familiar. Only worse.

Another public official ousted for insufficient ideological purity under Acting President Donald Trump is fighting reassignment. Rick Bright this week lost his position as director of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority. The head of an agency charged with overseeing research into a coronavirus vaccine found himself abruptly reassigned to the National Institutes of Health amidst a pandemic on track to kill more Americans in two months than died in the Vietnam War:

“I believe this transfer was in response to my insistence that the government invest the billions of dollars allocated by Congress to address the COVID-19 pandemic into safe and scientifically vetted solutions, and not in drugs, vaccines and other technologies that lack scientific merit. I am speaking out because to combat this deadly virus, science — not politics or cronyism — has to lead the way,” Dr. Rick Bright said Wednesday in a statement issued by his lawyers.

“Specifically, and contrary to misguided directives, I limited the broad use of chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine, promoted by the Administration as a panacea, but which clearly lack scientific merit. While I am prepared to look at all options and to think ‘outside the box’ for effective treatments, I rightly resisted efforts to provide an unproven drug on demand to the American public,” Bright said in the statement, which was first reported by The New York Times.

In his daily briefing on Wednesday, Trump claimed, “I never heard of him.” But he’s heard of hydroxychloroquine. For weeks he’s been hyping the anti-malaria drug as a “game changer” in the fight against COVID-19. A small study released Tuesday found more deaths among those treated with hydroxychloroquine than among patients given standard treatments.

Doesn’t matter. Make Trump look bad and you’re gone. Even if you’re right. Ask Michael K. Atkinson, former intelligence community inspector general. Ask Lt. Col. Alexander S. Vindman, the national security aide who testified under subpoena before the House. Or his twin brother. Or former ambassador Gordon D. Sondland. Or Capt. Brett Crozier, former commander of the USS Theodore Roosevelt. Or James Comey or Andrew McCabe or Jeff Sessions or … you get the point.

The pattern recalls the 2007 Bush Department of Justice purge of federal prosecutors. A 2017 Brennan Center report summarized the scandal:

DOJ political leadership fired seven well-respected U.S. Attorneys, dismissing some top Republican prosecutors because they had refused to prosecute nonexistent voter fraud. Senior officials hired career staff members using a political loyalty test, perverted the work of the nonpartisan Voting Section toward partisan ends, and exerted pressure on states and an independent government agency to fall in line with an anti-voting rights agenda.

After a 22 -month investigation, the DOJ brought no criminal charges against former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales or others involved.

A 2008 report by the DOJ Office of Inspector General and Office of Professional Responsibility found that when hiring for the department’s Honors Program and Summer Law Intern Program (the Monica Goodling scandal), the Bush DOJ exhibited “a pattern of deselecting candidates based on political or ideological affiliations.” Politico reported those programs “are used to funnel new law-school graduates into DOJ’s ranks.” In fact, they broke the law. There were resignations, but no charges filed.

Why bring those matters up again? This story on the Trump Office of Personnel Management stonewalling congressional Democrats trying to assess teleworking arrangements for federal employees:

Former officials and others have expressed concern in interviews that OPM’s new leadership favors sweeping changes to the federal workforce — in ways that would fundamentally change the nature of government service.

At the same time, other top officials are seeking to align the federal workforce more squarely with President Trump’s political agenda, rankling longtime civil servants. The drive has been spearheaded by John McEntee, the 29-year-old head of PPO and a fierce Trump loyalist.

OPM is currently headed up by acting director Mike Rigas, who assumed the role in mid-March after the abrupt resignation of Dale Cabaniss, who stepped down because of alleged poor treatment by several Trump appointees. Rigas has worked as the deputy director of OPM for the last two years and is also an alum of the Heritage Foundation.

Why, yes, there’s more (emphasis mine):

Rigas has told colleagues that he questions the constitutionality of the 1883 Pendleton Act, which codifies using merit to pick government officials, and believes that all executive branch employees should be political appointees, according to a person who has discussed the matter with him.

They want the executive branch fully politicized. Loyalists or nothing. Trump and Republican allies could soon have the conservative judges in place to allow it.

Ivins said of the Bush administration in 2003, “One of the fatal political mistakes they’re making is that classic political mistake when you only listen to the people on your side. That information group gets narrower and narrower and people convince themselves of things that simply aren’t true.”

What the Bushies attempted, Trump is trying again with less subtlety. He’s Trump-izing the federal government, taking the Trump Organization national in a way Karl Rove never dreamed. Ivins saw the possibility in 2003:

Austin Chronicle: What do you think is the relationship between Texas and national politics right now?

MI: We’re taking Texas national — it’s like that old [Terry Allen album] Lubbock (on Everything) ought be changed to Texas on Everything. They are Texas-izing the entire country; it’s amazing the other 49 haven’t seceded. There’s that old saying around the Capitol: “The purpose of government is to create a healthy business climate.” People really believe that here — and the result is we’re 49th in every indicator of people’s health and education and welfare and safety and all that other good stuff, and often we don’t even have a healthy business climate to show for it. I just think that “Let ‘er rip,” late-19th-century unregulated capitalism is back. As near as I can tell, that’s where Rove and the ideologues want to take the country. They want to completely undo the Great Society and the New Deal.

Ivins said of Pat Buchanan’s infamous 1992 Republican Convention speech that it “probably sounded better in the original German.” Trump’s 2016 convention speech might have killed her if the cancer hadn’t first. How I miss her.

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Note: The pandemic will upend standard field tactics in 2020. If enough promising “improvisations” come my way by June, perhaps I can issue a COVID-19 supplement.

The mayor of Las Vegas basically says that businesses know best when it comes to a global pandemic. This is what comes from people who simply cannot understand the concept of the common good.

Las Vegas Mayor Carolyn Goodman on Wednesday repeatedly called for the city’s businesses to reopen while refusing to provide any social distancing guidelines on how to do so safely.

“I am not a private owner. That’s the competition in this country. The free enterprise and to be able to make sure that what you offer the public meets the needs of the public,” Goodman, an independent, told CNN’s Anderson Cooper.

“Right now, we’re in a crisis health-wise, and so for a restaurant to be open or a small boutique to be open, they better figure it out. That’s their job. That’s not the mayor’s job.”

I sure hope they consult their insurance carriers and lawyers. If they don’t think there will be tremendous liability if people get sick in their establishments because they failed to follow the advice of the public health experts that’s out there for everyone to see, they are kidding themselves.

Free enterprise is the cure-all for everything in the libertarian mind.

Update:

Oh my God

Misinformation has deadly consequences:

Throughout the coronavirus pandemic, media critics have warned that the decision from leading Fox News hosts to downplay the outbreak could cost lives. A new study provides statistical evidence that, in the case of Sean Hannity, that’s exactly what happened.

The paper — from economists Leonardo Bursztyn, Aakaash Rao, Christopher Roth, and David Yanagizawa-Drott — focused on Fox news programming in February and early March. 

At the time, Hannity’s show was downplaying or ignoring the virus, while fellow Fox host Tucker Carlson was warning viewers about the disease’s risks…

Greater exposure to Hannity relative to Tucker Carlson Tonight leads to a greater number of COVID-19 cases and deaths,” they write. “A one-standard deviation increase in relative viewership of Hannity relative to Carlson is associated with approximately 30 percent more COVID-19 cases on March 14, and 21 percent more COVID-19 deaths on March 28.”

This is a working paper; it hasn’t been peer reviewed or accepted for publication at a journal. However, it’s consistent with a wide body of research finding that media consumption in general, and Fox News viewership in particular, can have a pretty powerful effect on individual behavior…

“It’s a good paper; they took pains to control for many alternative explanations,” writes Zeynep Tufecki, a professor at the University of North Carolina who studies technology and research methods. 

“This really looks like a causal effect of misinformation [leading] to deaths.”

If you wondered why Trump tweeted that condescending bullshit this morning:

Morning Consult tracked surveys showing that people older than 65 strongly believe — by a 6-to-1 margin — that the government should focus more on addressing the spread of coronavirus than on restarting the economy.

As the president signals that he wants to reopen states before their governors and public health experts recommend as responsible, older Americans are losing their support for him.

Senior citizens approved of Trump’s handling of the outbreak in mid-March at a higher rate than any other group, with a net approval of plus-19.Defend democracy. Click to invest in courageous progressive journalism today.

But Morning Consult found that approval had drained away by 20 points over the past month — and now their support is lower than any age group besides 18- to 29-year olds.

Seniors would prefer not to live in prison for the rest of their lives so that Trump and his unhinged death cult can parade around waving flags and infecting everyone they know. It’s a bad bet. That’s what he’s offering people over 60 because he’s clearly ready to let lots and lots of people die so his cult and his business buddies can be appeased.

Good luck with this plan. There are many millions of liberal baby boomers and older who were never going to vote for him anyway. But there are many more who have been his avid fans. If he loses them, he’s got a problem. And just telling them that “special care” will be “given them” probably isn’t all that comforting. They may love to own the libs like al the Trump cultists do, but this is life and death and on some level these people know he is an ignorant clown.

And, by the way, many of the younger people who will get it in the inevitable successive waves because of reopening prematurely are in danger of suffering long term organ damage but I guess that’s fine too. (And killing black and brown people in large numbers is a feature not a bug, I’m sure. ) Trump is convinced that his re-election depends on risking killing all these people so he’s going to do it. It’s all he cares about.

Back on April 13, President Trump made an astonishing declaration, even for him, and he’s made some doozies. You may recall that this was the briefing at which he showed a strange campaign-style video featuring compliments from Democratic officials, which had clearly been inspired by a very similar compilation shown the night before on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show, already a de facto Trump celebration hour.

It was also the appearance in which he repeatedly made the claim that he had “total authority” to reopen the government and blathered on about how he’d saved hundreds of thousands of lives when he supposedly “closed” the country in the first place.

Kaitlan Collins of CNN asked him a question I think we all were wondering at that point:

You said, “When someone is president of the United States, their authority is total.” That is not true. Who — who told you that?

Trump didn’t answer. The next day Trump announced that it would be up to the governors to decide when they wanted to open up. (He said he would “authorize” them to do it, even though they don’t need any such authorization.) Various media outlets have reported that he was convinced to do this because it would be better for his electoral prospects if he can blame the governors for whatever goes wrong with the reopening.

Trump has often touted his alleged total authority, saying on one famous occasion that Article II of the Constitution gives him “the right to do whatever I want as president.” But when Collins asked him that question I was pretty sure I knew who told him that. The most powerful legal authority in the administration who believes that the president has almost unlimited power is Attorney General William Barr.

Barr made an appearance on Laura Ingraham’s show not long ago — I wrote about it here — and made some comments at the time which give us a clue about how he sees the president’s authority in this circumstance. Ingraham went on a tear about forcing churches to close during the pandemic and Barr correctly pointed out that unless the state was singling out religious institutions for closure while allowing other large gatherings, the First Amendment had not been violated.

What came next in that conversation reveals Barr’s real agenda, however, and possibly that of all the other schemers in the administration. At the time of the interview, the first rumblings from the astroturf groups in various swing states with Democratic governors were starting to be heard. Barr was on it already:

I think we have to be very careful to make sure this is — you know, that the draconian measures that are being adopted are fully justified, and there are not alternative ways of protecting people. And I think, you know, when this — when this period of time is — at the end of April expires, I think we have to allow people to adapt more than we have and not just tell people to go home and hide under the bed, but allow them to use other ways — social distancing and other means — to protect themselves.

Since then we’ve had heavily-covered small protests like this around the country demanding that governors rescind their stay-at-home orders:

More scenes from in front of city county building @TribLIVE pic.twitter.com/h6fPLFFDCL

— Shane Dunlap (@shanedunlap) April 20, 2020

At least they were wearing masks.

On Tuesday, Barr appeared on Hugh Hewitt’s show and made clear that if anyone thought the top law enforcement officer in the country might find armed protests against public health measures to be a threat to public order, they needed to think again. He reiterated his belief that the states have imposed unnecessary and draconian measures and implicitly backed the protests, calling stay-at-home orders “disturbingly close to house arrest.”

The legal issues he believes are salient are civil liberties and something vague to do with interstate commerce. If I had to guess, I’d suggest that Barr intends to argue that states that are not open for business are somehow impinging on other states’ rights to conduct business across state lines. Either that, or he anticipates that there really will be checkpoints on the highways as infected people from Trump states decide to descend upon others. In any case, he announced that the federal government will join individual lawsuits to force states to open, whatever the task force guidelines endorsed by Vice President Pence may say.

According to the Detroit News, Barr has the support of the man who was widely considered the worst attorney general of recent history, Reagan administration stalwart Ed Meese. Apparently, Meese and some other right-wing extremists wrote to Barr earlier this week, accusing the states of “rampant abuses of constitutional rights and civil liberties” and exhorting him “to undertake an immediate review of all the orders that have been issued by the states and local governments across the nation.”

Is it possible that these people are unaware that these measures are being taken all over the world to contain a deadly virus? Do they think these governors are doing this out of some twisted ideological desire to destroy their constituents’ livelihoods and their states’ tax bases? Apparently so.

It’s hard to know how widely Barr plans to use Department of Justice levers to force Americans to risk their lives for Donald Trump. But he is definitely figuring out ways to help make that happen.

For a man without a medical degree or any other relevant expertise, he seems confident that he knows more than the public health experts about how to deal with a deadly pandemic:

You can’t just keep on feeding the patient chemotherapy and say well, we’re killing the cancer, because we were getting to the point where we’re killing the patient. And now is the time that we have to start looking ahead and adjusting to more targeted therapies.

If there is a worse analogy for what we’re going through, I haven’t heard it.

At the moment, social distancing is the only way we have of mitigating the spread of the disease and killing tens of thousands of people unnecessarily. There is no “targeted therapy,” metaphorical or otherwise. But Trump and Barr and the rest of the nihilist right are telling Americans that they should ignore all the scientific expertise and go out and play Russian roulette in workplaces, malls and restaurants, all in the name of freedom and liberty.

It’s true that Barr hasn’t said that Trump can simply issue an “order” forcing these state governments to go against all the pubic health recommendations. But he has almost certainly told him that the Department of Justice can figure out how to get the job done. There is more than one way to exercise “total authority.”

My Salon column republished with permission

The NY Times’ David Leonhardt points out a troubling bit of data:

If you’ve been following the charts showing the number of new coronavirus cases in the United States each day, you may have noticed a worrisome pattern in the last few days.

The number of new cases appears to have peaked about a week and a half ago. But the decline since then has been very modest. There are still about 30,000 Americans being diagnosed each day. The seven-day moving average of new cases — a measure that smooths out daily fluctuations — has declined only 2 percent since it peaked 11 days ago.

As you can see in the chart above, that’s not typical. In other countries, the number of new cases has usually declined much more sharply after peaking.

As you can see in the chart above, that’s not typical. In other countries, the number of new cases has usually declined much more sharply after peaking.

Why? It’s impossible to know for certain with a virus as complex and unknown as this one. But there is an obvious potential cause: Many political leaders in the United States, including President Trump, are not following the advice of public health experts.

Those experts have urged a range of measures: continued social distancing until the number of cases falls further; a rapid expansion of virus testing; and planning an extensive program of “contact tracing” and quarantining, to allow for gradual reopening. The United States is taking some of these steps, but only some.

Maybe we haven’t actually peaked?

There’s a lot of speculation that the model the “task force” is primarily using may be wrong. If you are interested in going down a rabbit hole to take a look at that, here’s a twitter thread on it:

Is there a big omnibus Twitter megathread on all the problems with the IHME model?

— jonstokes.(eth|com) (@jonst0kes) April 21, 2020

2020:

Three nurses showed up to counter-protest the Arizona “liberate” rally.

They stood silently.

And the “liberate” crowd didn’t leave them alone. They stood in their faces and berated them.

These women are heroes, and deserve so much better.
pic.twitter.com/h3NrLfvN13

— Read Let This Radicalize You (@JoshuaPHilll) April 21, 2020

2010:

I’ve posted that tea party video a dozen times to illustrate the heartlessness of the right-wing of this country toward sick people. They have an irrational, obsessive hatred of … health care. Now they are so heartless they are going after health care workers who are putting their own lives at risk — and are willingly infecting themselves and their one loved ones with a deadly virus.

To make a political point.

There are other stories to review this morning, but Dr. Richard Levitan’s April 20 New York Times op-ed could save your life.

Levitan has practiced emergency medicine for 30 years. He volunteered at New York’s Bellevue Hospital in March. There he discovered patients arriving at the hospital with advanced “Covid pneumonia” and extremely low blood oxygen levels without “any sensation of breathing problems.” They’d been sick for days but only sought medical help when shortness of breath came on rapidly. Patients arriving with other illnesses and injuries also had Covid pneumonia without knowing it. Levitan calls this “silent hypoxia” insidious:

Pneumonia is an infection of the lungs in which the air sacs fill with fluid or pus. Normally, patients develop chest discomfort, pain with breathing and other breathing problems. But when Covid pneumonia first strikes, patients don’t feel short of breath, even as their oxygen levels fall. And by the time they do, they have alarmingly low oxygen levels and moderate-to-severe pneumonia (as seen on chest X-rays). Normal oxygen saturation for most persons at sea level is 94 percent to 100 percent; Covid pneumonia patients I saw had oxygen saturations as low as 50 percent.

To my amazement, most patients I saw said they had been sick for a week or so with fever, cough, upset stomach and fatigue, but they only became short of breath the day they came to the hospital. Their pneumonia had clearly been going on for days, but by the time they felt they had to go to the hospital, they were often already in critical condition.

Without knowing it.

The “vast majority” of patients Levitan saw showed no signs of extreme duress yet “dangerously low oxygen levels and terrible pneumonia on chest X-rays.” They were even talking on their cell phones. By the time they arrived at the hospital, many had severe lung damage and would require a ventilator which introduces its own set of medical complications. Levitan describes the mechanics in the article.

Silent hypoxia progressing rapidly to respiratory failure explains cases of Covid-19 patients dying suddenly after not feeling short of breath. (It appears that most Covid-19 patients experience relatively mild symptoms and get over the illness in a week or two without treatment.)

A major reason this pandemic is straining our health system is the alarming severity of lung injury patients have when they arrive in emergency rooms. Covid-19 overwhelmingly kills through the lungs. And because so many patients are not going to the hospital until their pneumonia is already well advanced, many wind up on ventilators, causing shortages of the machines. And once on ventilators, many die.

Levitan says there is a simple device (although not free — FDA-approved models start at around $45) for detecting low O₂ levels at home with a pulse oximeter available at the drug store or online. These are those little devices that clamp to your finger and read out your pulse. They also read oxygen saturation in the blood.

Several of the highest-rated consumer models are already sold out on Amazon. (See image above.)

Early detection of the pneumonia can improve survival rates. Levitan suggests people who detect low oxygen levels check with their doctors before rushing to emergency rooms. Misinterpretation of readings or unrecognized chronic lung issues could be involved. But patients who test positive for COVID-19 should monitor themselves for two weeks. Others with “cough, fatigue and fevers should also have pulse oximeter monitoring even if they have not had virus testing, or even if their swab test was negative.” The tests are only about 70 percent accurate.

There are 260,000 people in my county and 48 lab-confirmed positive COVID-19 cases as of Tuesday. How is it my wife and I can know three ill with the virus? Because they aren’t included in that count, like many Americans who are ill but untested. Levitan reminds readers a majority of Americans already exposed to the virus don’t know it. Just like those who don’t know they have pneumonia.

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For The Win, 3rd Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV mechanics guide at ForTheWin.us. This is what winning looks like.
Note: The pandemic will upend standard field tactics in 2020. If enough promising “improvisations” come my way by June, perhaps I can issue a COVID-19 supplement.

A new study found no benefit and a higher death rate for Trump’s unproven cure:

Coronavirus patients taking hydroxychloroquine, a treatment touted by President Trump, were no less likely to need mechanical ventilation and had higher deaths rates compared to those who did not take the drug, according to a study of hundreds of patients at US Veterans Health Administration medical centers.

The study, which reviewed veterans’ medical charts, was posted Tuesday on medrxiv.org, a pre-print server, meaning it was not peer reviewed or published in a medical journal. The research was funded by the National Institutes of Health and the University of Virginia.

In the study of 368 patients, 97 patients who took hydroxychloroquine had a 27.8% death rate. The 158 patients who did not take the drug had an 11.4% death rate.

“An association of increased overall mortality was identified in patients treated with hydroxychloroquine alone. These findings highlight the importance of awaiting the results of ongoing prospective, randomized, controlled studies before widespread adoption of these drugs,” wrote the authors, who work at the Columbia VA Health Care System in South Carolina, the University of South Carolina and the University of Virginia.

Researchers also looked at whether taking hydroxychloroquine or a combination of hydroxychloroquine and the antibiotic azithromycin, had an effect on whether a patient needed to go on a ventilator.

4 ways Trump was wrong about hydroxychloroquine studies
“In this study, we found no evidence that use of hydroxychloroquine, either with or without azithromycin, reduced the risk of mechanical ventilation in patients hospitalized with Covid-19,” the authors wrote.

Emphasis Added:

There are currently no products approved by the US Food and Drug Administration to prevent or treat Covid-19, although research is underway on many drugs.