Media Post Misleading Info to Dash Hopes for Possible Drug Cure Which Trump Touted
Posted at 10:00 pm on March 21, 2020 by Nick Arama
President Donald Trump speaks during press briefing with the coronavirus task force, at the White House, Thursday, March 19, 2020, in Washington. Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Dr. Stephen Hahn, at left, and Dr. Deborah Birx, White House coronavirus response coordinator, at right listen. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
On Thursday, President Donald Trump announced that there had been encouraging results found early testing of Hydroxychloroquine, a drug used for many years to treat malaria, in fighting the Wuhan coronavirus.
The administration said they would be fast tracking the trials on the drug.
So what was the media’s reaction to this good news?
We’ve already reported on part of it. NBC’s Peter Alexander claiming Trump was somehow misleading people by being hopeful and CNN chastising Trump for having “unsubstantiated hope.”
But media even went a step further to try to knock down any possibility that people might feel hopeful from the announcement.
Here they go.
You mean a drug if you don’t take it as prescribed, but take in huge doses could be dangerous? Too much Aspirin can kill you. Who would have thought? Isn’t that true of most drugs? How dishonest is that? And no, people aren’t taken it in 2 gram doses.
The drug was used to treat malaria safely for decades, it probably has more of a history than many drugs, but this is how the media paints it, because Trump. If it had been Barack Obama, the headline would have been “Obama touts drug, used safely for years, for incredible new use.”
Bloomberg jumps aboard the train to suggest that that evil Trump may even have poisoned people by offering hope for a cure.
The story of course shows no indication that it has anything to do with Trump saying it (the story of the potential of the drug has been all over the media before Trump spoke of it). Not to mention anyone knows better than to self-medicate or overdose against medical instruction.
But it’s Trump’s fault for saying there’s a positive possibility on the horizon? At what point does the media just implode under the weight of their own hypocrisy? If he is positive, he’s giving false hope. If he’s negative about something, he’s “downplaying it.” No matter what he says, he’s always wrong, to them because that’s the basic rule.
Just another point, Trump was talking about hydroxychloroquine, not chloroquine, but they don’t make that distinction and just say chloroquine in both stories.
Pretty sick to try to mislead people in the middle of a pandemic.
Perhaps National Review editor Charles C.W. Cooke had the best response for MSN and Bloomberg. “Wait until they hear about morphine,” he said.
