Trump Hails Hydroxychloroquine As Coronavirus Game-Changer From White House Podium, Identifies Personal Hunch As Adequate Basis For Medical Recommendation To Nation Of 330 Million

The Filing

WASHINGTON. President Donald Trump used Thursday's coronavirus task force briefing to endorse hydroxychloroquine, a malaria and lupus drug not approved for treatment of the novel coronavirus, as a potential game changer, administration officials confirmed, adding that the President's recommendation was based on a feeling he had developed over the course of the previous several days.

Standing alongside members of his coronavirus task force, including infectious disease officials visibly attempting to insert qualifying language in real time, the President described the drug as "tremendous" and indicated that Americans should consider taking it, citing as evidence the fact that it had been around for a long time and that he thought it might work.

"What do you have to lose?" the President asked, posing the question to a nation of 330 million Americans on behalf of pharmacology, a discipline that had spent the previous century compiling approximately seventeen distinct answers to that question.

Within nine days, the Food and Drug Administration issued an emergency use authorization for hydroxychloroquine in hospitalized COVID-19 patients, after which the federal government acquired 29 million doses of a drug that subsequent clinical trials would find delivered no benefit to coronavirus patients while elevating their risk of cardiac arrhythmia. The resulting shortage caused lupus and rheumatoid arthritis patients, who require the medication to control autoimmune symptoms they have, to be unable to fill the prescriptions they had.

In Phoenix, a 60-year-old man died after ingesting chloroquine phosphate, a related compound used to clean fish tanks, having concluded from the briefings that the chemical fell within the spirit of the President's recommendation. His wife, who survived after being hospitalized, told reporters that the couple had been watching the news together and had wanted to take action.

The FDA revoked its emergency authorization on June 15, citing risks that outweighed benefits. By that point the President had moved on, announcing in May that he had personally begun taking hydroxychloroquine as a preventative measure, a decision he characterized as "very interesting" and which his White House physician justified in a memorandum that did not directly state the President was on the drug.

At press time, sources within the administration reported that the President was already feeling strongly about a different course of treatment, the details of which he would share with the public as soon as he could remember the name.

Who Benefits

§Donald J. Trump, presented to the public as a decisive leader pushing a solution while his administration's pandemic response continued to lack adequate testing, contact tracing, and personal protective equipment for hospital staff.
§Bayer, Sanofi, Teva, Mylan, and other hydroxychloroquine manufacturers, recipients of a 29-million-dose federal stockpile order for a drug shortly to be shown to provide no coronavirus benefit.
§Fox News hosts and conservative talk-radio personalities, who had spent the prior fortnight promoting hydroxychloroquine on air and who now had the President of the United States reading from their script at the White House podium.
§The Trump 2020 reelection campaign, which acquired the appearance of a working federal response in time for the spring fundraising cycle.
§FDA leadership willing to issue Emergency Use Authorization without adequate supporting evidence, having demonstrated career-advancing flexibility under direct presidential pressure.
§The Indian generic pharmaceutical industry, the world's principal supplier of hydroxychloroquine, briefly granted significant diplomatic leverage with the United States during an active global pandemic.
§Every subsequent political official wishing to direct emergency drug authorizations from a podium, who acquired a usable American precedent.
§Russian and other authoritarian state media outlets, supplied at no cost with footage of the American scientific establishment being publicly overridden by the President of the United States.

Sourced to the public record · presented without editorial embellishment