For several weeks, Trump has been promoting an anti-malaria drug called hydroxychloroquine to treat COVID-19. FOX News has enthusiastically echoed Trump’s claims, disregarding the judgment of medical doctors who warned that the drug’s effectiveness had not been proven in clinical trials.
The Washington Post reporters Paul Farhi and Elahe Izadi explained.
At the height of Fox News’s coverage of a would-be treatment for the novel coronavirus, the network’s medical correspondent, Marc Siegel, offered a remarkable testimonial during Tucker Carlson’s show.
Siegel said his 96-year-old father, suffering from symptoms of the virus and fearing he would die, made a full recovery thanks to the drug, hydroxychloroquine, and a course of antibiotics. “He got up the next day and was fine,” Siegel told an astonished Carlson.
Siegel’s miraculous-recovery story was part of a near-campaign for hydroxychloroquine by Fox News and its sister network, Fox Business.
Echoing President Trump’s description of the drug as a “game changer,” Carlson, Laura Ingraham, Sean Hannity, Lou Dobbs and “Fox & Friends” hosts spoke of its potential benefits in dozens of segments from mid-March to mid-April.
They also criticized those in the media and the medical establishment who raised concerns, turning a debate among researchers and scientists into another front in the culture wars.
But in the past week or so, Trump has all but stopped talking about hydroxychloroquine. And so have Fox News’s hosts.
The relative silence follows disappointing, even alarming, new research about hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for covid-19, the disease caused by the virus. A study released this week on 368 male Veterans Affairs patients with the disease showed that the death rate among those given the drug, both in combination with another drug and alone, was higher than for those who were not. Researchers also said its use made no difference in the need for ventilators.
Like other fast-moving research about covid-19 treatments, the study by VA and academic researchers hasn’t undergone the typical peer-review process and isn’t the kind of formal clinical trial, like those underway elsewhere, that will offer more definitive answers. However, it was based on one of the largest collections of data about the drug’s use.
Claims about hydroxychloroquine to treat covid-19 have gained traction despite a lack of scientific evidence. How did this happen? (Elyse Samuels, Meg Kelly, Sarah Cahlan/The Washington Post)
Another study, released by French researchers last week, offered more discouraging clues. It found no statistically significant difference in the death rates among 181 covid-19 patients who had taken hydroxychloroquine within 48 hours of being admitted to a hospital and those who hadn’t. The study also highlighted dangerous side effects; eight developed arrhythmia, or abnormal heart rhythms, and had to stop taking it.
On Tuesday, an expert panel convened by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases advised physicians against prescribing hydroxychloroquine with the antibiotic azithromycin because of the potential side effects. The panel said there wasn’t enough evidence yet to recommend for or against hydroxychloroquine as a treatment. The agency is headed by Trump’s top infectious disease adviser, Anthony S. Fauci, who has repeatedly tempered Trump’s upbeat commentary about the drug.
All of which raises a question about the Fox News hosts’ advocacy of hydroxychloroquine: Were they pushing a potentially ineffective, even dangerous, remedy in the absence of sound science and well in excess of their expertise or knowledge?
For Fox News hosts, the hydroxychloroquine controversy is fuel for the culture war
A Fox spokeswoman declined to comment directly on any prime-time commentary but mentioned recent segments that “show the network’s attention to all sides of this story from a news and opinion perspective.”
Carlson, Hannity and Ingraham didn’t mention the new research on their programs on Tuesday. The topic was replaced by rhetoric about China’s culpability for the pandemic and advocacy for reopening the country, again seemingly as part of a feedback loop with Trump’s own comments.
Ingraham, who met with Trump in early April to urge him to push the drug, hadn’t discussed hydroxychloroquine since April 15. But on Wednesday, Ingraham devoted the beginning of her show to address the study of VA patients, calling it a “shockingly irresponsible” survey and “perhaps even agenda-driven.” She also criticized the media coverage around the study.
She said the study lacked methodological rigor and that the drug works best on patients who aren’t yet severely sick, unlike in the survey.
“What’s driving this? It’s a blind obsession to disprove the effectiveness of a drug that’s being used right now tonight in medical centers across America,” Ingraham said. “Is this a mad impulse to discount any benefit from the therapy? Is it triggered by pure hatred of Trump, Fox or me? I don’t know. Is it motivated by a secret desire to keep America hopeless?”
Syndicated TV host Mehmet Oz — an enthusiastic promoter of the drug in his many guest appearances on Fox News — seemed to backpedal from his usual advocacy on Wednesday’s “Fox & Friends.”
“The fact of the matter is, we don’t know,” he told co-host Brian Kilmeade, adding, “There’s a lot of variables. Brian, I gotta say at this point there is so much data coming from so many places, we are better off waiting for the randomized trials Dr. Fauci has been asking for. Otherwise, we keep reacting back and forth to studies that show opposite results, and a lot of it might have to do with when you get the medication.”
Oz, a cardiac surgeon with limited expertise in pharmacology or virology, had previously said on Fox News that Fauci — the government’s leading infectious-disease expert — needed to “respect” the positive results of studies conducted to date, even if they were small.
Given the new data, Fox News has an obligation to give equal time to the doubts and potential dangers of hydroxychloroquine, said William Haseltine, the eminent biologist and biotech entrepreneur.
“That’s just public responsibility,” said Haseltine, who is chairman and president of Access Health International, a nonprofit organization that seeks to expand access to health care. “They have a duty to inform their [viewers] that they made a mistake. It’s not a crime to make a mistake, but they do need to correct it.”
In contrast to the network’s popular commentators, Fox’s news programs and website have been more cautious and have reported on the new research.
The network on Tuesday played clips from a White House press briefing in which Stephen Hahn, commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, urged waiting for randomized clinical trials “to actually make a definitive decision around safety and efficacy.”
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Trump sounded a bit less enthusiastic about hydroxychloroquine during the same briefing. He said he was unaware of the VA study. He also said, “Obviously, there have been some very good reports and perhaps this one is not a good report. But we’ll be looking at it.”
OK. so Hydroxychloroquine is out. Now we have the absurdity of injecting disinfectants like bleach or isopropyl alcohol into one’s system to get rid of the virus OR getting UV light inside the body to combat the disease. So how long will it take before some stupid Trump/Fox News follower decides to perform their own “drug” trial?
The FOX news folks should try it on themselves first
LOL.
and a few people likely made huge profits while the hydroxychloroquin snake-oil salesmanship was in full swing…
The execs at Murdoch the Morlock’s Faux News, aka the Trump Maladministration Propaganda Network, have doubtless gotten an earful from the company’s lawyers. LOL.
You can lie and lie and lie, but you can’t do this if the lies CAUSE people to die. Their surviving relatives will sue you.
But Dr. Trump, that stable genius, has new ideas. Here, from the Daily Beast’s report on the latest Coronavirus Briefing and Trump 2020 Pep Rally:
Trump asked whether UV light could be used to help people with the virus, whether sunlight could be brought “inside the body,” or whether disinfectant materials could be injected into bodies or used to cleanse bodies in the same way they disinfect surfaces.
“So supposing we hit the body with a tremendous, whether it’s ultraviolet or just very powerful light and I think you said that hasn’t been checked but you’re going to test it. And then I said supposing you brought the light inside the body, which you can do either through the skin or in some other way,” Trump said, adding it “sounds interesting.”
Now he’s a doctor?
A quack.
Inject people with disinfectant!!!!! This man doesn’t have the understanding of science of a toddler. I hope that not too many of his idiot followers follow his advice!!!! If they do, what can I say? Darwin Award.
But his uncle was a doctor, Bob!
Whose uncle was a doctor?
Trump’s uncle, John Trump, was a professor, hence a “doctor,” at MIT. Actually sounds like a decent and accomplished guy.
Even as a child, Jabba the Trump was the smartest slug on the cabbage leaf.
Well, if you fact check, it wasn’t really a cabbage leaf.
Jabba the Trump was chowing down on poison ivy and to this day he claims it was the greatest cabbage he ever ate because he is so smart, a stable genius, in fact.
And here I always thought that the orange skin and the blonde troll-doll hair was from tan-in-a-can and hair dye. But this is common among invertebrates like Trump, I suppose–signalling their poisonousness via bright colors. I guess he must have imbibed some of that venom like Rappaccini’s daughter. LOL. Lord knows, he has been the kiss of death to a great many of his subordinates–not yet to our entire country, of course, though he’s certainly giving that his bloated all.
What if Trump is not Trump but Putin or someone else wearing one of those silicone masks the CIA uses to have an agent become someone else?
Slugs communicate with other slugs by laying down mucousy slime trails. They don’t have brains, per se, but do have a few nodes of neural cells. Altogether, they have about 20K of these, as opposed to the 100 billion in a human.
Some slugs, like Jabba, carry parasites that can get into your brain and destroy it. This has been your Natural History Minute, April 23, 2020.
Yes but doesn’t the source of the misrepresentation need to be one a “reasonable man” would rely on? Not sure either Fox pundits or their viewers qualify…
Fox responsible? Never. Fox doesn’t know what the word means. According to Roger Ailes: Fox give its audience what they want (not the truth based on facts)
Trump and Fox News aren’t the only ones who are falling silent.
I read some Democrat-haters on the left — the ones who seem to often change the subject from criticism of Trump to how evil the Democrats are — who brushed off Trump’s hyping of hydroxychloroquine as not a big deal and Trump just trying to “be positive”. After all, it “could” be something worth trying, they argued, so why such concern about Trump hyping it when the important thing is to talk about how Joe Biden is an evil, awful man.
No doubt they will brush off Trump now talking about UV light and using disinfectants internally.
It shocks me that Trump can do the most outrageous things that keep making a serious crisis far worse, but there are still people who claim to be Bernie supporters who still argue that they don’t care if Trump continues to reign supreme for more years as long as the evil Democrats are punished for not nominating Bernie Sanders. Ironically, the very same Bernie Sanders those very same people believe has such bad judgement that they would never trust Bernie’s endorsement of Biden.
By the way, does anyone know how much taxpayer money the federal government spent to stockpile the drug that Trump was hyping?
There is nothing wrong with running trials of hydroxychloroquine along with other possible treatments. That is normal. What isn’t normal is Trump hyping and stockpiling one drug before he has any evidence that it is the miracle drug he kept claiming it was.
In a week, Trump and Fox News will claim they always knew the drug would not work, and Trump will simply blatantly deny he ever hyped it. Trump supporters will believe it, and Democrat-haters on the left will normalize that.
In a week, when Trump explains that he always knew hydroxychloroquine wasn’t a good cure, that will become the new reality.
Scary times. Orwellian times. And that doesn’t lead to a progressive country, it leads to a fascist dictatorship.
The paradox of profound ignorance is not knowing how ignorant you are. This is, as you probably know, the Dunning-Kruger Effect. And so, of course, Trump thinks himself an expert on everything.
India has been using it as a prophylactic for medical workers since it was approved by their health ministry a month ago.
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/govt-allows-use-of-malaria-drug-for-healthcare-workers/articleshow/74784129.cms
Maybe Dr. Trump and his Magical Medicine Show can recommend something to cure my neuralgia and dropsy?
Hey, everyone. Don’t worry. The Trump administration tapped a Labradoodle breeder to run the Pandemic Task Force.
Maybe this fellow will pass out syringes and bottles of disinfectant to all the Republican leadership.
NEWSFLASH: The GOP discovers that using a syringe to inject a bubble of air into your arteries will cure you of COVID-19. No need for drugs. Just inject the air bubble and all of your fears will be over. If you voted for Donald Trump, the syringe and air bubble are free.
Lloyd! You bad boy! 🙂
Twitter just named Trump the “Tide Pods President.”
Tide is not a disinfectant.
He should be called the Clorox president.
Do you think we could get him to drink it? I have a suspicion his doctor would not agree to inject it.
For anyone who needs to know it–which is unlikely to be anyone in, but nonetheless–here’s a fun fact. Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham, and Lou Dobbs are not climate scientists, virologists, biochemists, medical doctors, or, indeed, scientists of any kind. Nor, alas, are they journalists. Keep that in mind when listening to them, or ignore that fact at your peril.
It would be best if, as a society, we could agree to leave serious work to the grownups, and treat the above named people as children in the throes of a temper tantrum–which is what they are.
I’m just sayin’.
Will FOXNews now endorse injecting bleach to their zombie like brain warped viewers? To prove their true allegiance to ignorance over science I say they have no choice but to. First bottle of Bleach is on me.