How Trump Became Obsessed with Hydroxychloroquine

"What do you have to lose?" Donald Trump asked rhetorically at a press briefing on Saturday. He was talking about hydroxychloroquine, an antimalarial drug, which is also approved to treat lupus and rheumatoid arthritis, and which the president has latched on to as a miracle cure for coronavirus. Even if it's not, he says, coronavirus patients who are likely to die should go for it. "Take it. I really think they should take it. But it's their choice. And it's their doctor's choice or the doctors in the hospital. But hydroxychloroquine. Try it, if you'd like."

For now, there's limited evidence that hydroxychloroquine can help with mild cases of coronavirus, but that evidence is either anecdotal or based on questionable studies, some without control groups. Speaking to Face the Nation on CBS Sunday, Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said, "There have been cases that show there may be an effect, and there are others to show there's no effect. So, I think in terms of science, I don't think we could definitively say it works."

The president's hawking of the drug has caused people to hoard it, forcing the Lupus Foundation of America to issue a statement begging the White House Covid-19 response team to make sure that patients who definitely need hydroxychloroquine can still get it. At least two people ingested chloroquine fish-tank cleaner, thinking it was hydroxychloroquine-one man in Arizona died as a result.

There are other dangers to off-label use of the drug. Hydroxychloroquine can also cause arrhythmia that leads to a heart attack. Speaking to The Washington Post, Mark Gladwin of the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine warned that hydroxychloroquine hasn't been tested enough for doctors to know how much to give individual patients. And since the drug potentially interferes with heart contractions, it's vital to know what other drugs a patient is on, something that's becoming harder and harder as hospitals get overwhelmed. Megan Ranney, an emergency physician at Brown University, also told The New York Times, "It causes psychiatric symptoms, cardiac problems and a host of other bad side effects."

So why has Trump become so fixated on this drug? The idea that hydroxychloroquine could treat coronavirus started to take root in the U.S. in Silicon Valley in mid-March, as documented at the time. On March 13, a blockchain investor named James Todaro tweeted, "There is growing evidence of Chloroquine as a highly effective treatment for COVID-19," and linked to a Google Doc he and others wrote making the case. One of his coauthors, lawyer Gregory Rigano, went on Laura Ingraham's Fox News show to promote the idea on March 16. And the next day, Tesla CEO Elon Musk tweeted to his 33 million followers, "Maybe worth considering chloroquine for C19," followed by "Hydroxychloroquine probably better." The message was retweeted 13,700 times.

The first time Trump mentioned the drug was at a March 19 press briefing, where he said of it, "It's been around for a long time, so we know if things don't go as planned, it's not going to kill anybody." By March 21, he was much more enthusiastic, tweeting, "HYDROXYCHLOROQUINE & AZITHROMYCIN, taken together, have a real chance to be one of the biggest game changers in the history of medicine."

According to Media Matters, from March 23-29, Fox aired claims promoting the use of hydroxychloroquine 147 times, while only airing 18 claims questioning its effectiveness. Celebrity doctor Mehmet Oz-who has promoted dubious weight-loss scams and whose children are unvaccinated-has appeared on Fox News more than 20 times in two weeks hyping the drug. Oz points to one dubious French study from Marseille in particular, conducted by Didier Raoult, a French doctor who has previously questioned the validity of both climate change and evolution.