Anonymous ID: 45d9be July 3, 2020, 10:20 p.m. No.9850443   šŸ—„ļø.is šŸ”—kun   >>0656 >>0681 >>0713 >>0818 >>0898 >>0908 >>0952 >>0968 >>1023

Washington post promoting fear, did they also not recommend HCQ? stop and think for yourselves.

Trump got his crowd and his fireworks and peddled his fiction.

 

The setting for President Trumpā€™s early Fourth of July celebration was magnificent, as the Black Hills of South Dakota tend to be. The scene was also full of painful history, willful ignorance and deliberate fearmongering.

Friday night, in an amphitheater in the shadow of Mount Rushmore, a military band played smooth jazz on snare drums and trumpets as the country sank under the rising number of coronavirus infections. Thousands of unmasked guests, awaiting the arrival of the president sat shoulder to shoulder in black folding chairs tethered together in a kind of coronavirus chain of denial. The VIPs would, of course, be seated separately onstage ā€” not six feet apart, but not amid the storm of exhalations, coughs, vociferous cheers and sneezes. And just to add to the upside-down, inside-out madness of the mass gathering, Ivanka Trump, presidential adviser and daughter, tweeted a reminder to be safe over the holiday weekend by social distancing and wearing a mask. Her nearest and dearest did not listen to plea.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2020/07/04/trump-got-his-crowd-his-fireworks-peddled-his-fiction/

Anonymous ID: 45d9be July 3, 2020, 10:49 p.m. No.9850726   šŸ—„ļø.is šŸ”—kun   >>0742 >>0818 >>0908 >>0952 >>0968 >>1023

Washington posts view of president briefing on HCQ, letā€™s not erase history.

The real reason Trump is obsessed with hydroxychloroquine

One of the most bizarre and disturbing aspects of President Trumpā€™s nightly press briefings on the coronavirus pandemic is when he turns into a drug salesman. Like a cable TV pitchman hawking ā€œmale enhancementā€ pills, Trump regularly extols the virtues of taking hydroxychloroquine, a drug used to treat malaria and lupus, as a potential ā€œgame changerā€ that just might cure covid-19.

On Saturday, he even said: ā€œI think people should ā€” if it were me ā€” in fact, I might do it anyway. I may take it. Okay? I may take it.ā€ Iā€™m not only the president of the Hair Club for Men, Iā€™m also a client.

Full coverage of the coronavirus pandemic

But the evidence that hydroxychloroquine could actually be an effective treatment is, at this point, extremely thin. Might it be some kind of aid in treating the disease, for some patients? Yes, itā€™s possible. But Trumpā€™s enthusiasm for it is so out of proportion, and so relentless, that one has to ask: What the heck is going on here?

Some people are inclined to believe that Trump must have a financial motive, and the New York Times did report that he owns some stock in Sanofi, a company that makes the name-brand version of the drug. But I doubt thatā€™s whatā€™s at work. Instead, I think there are two reasons Trump is working so hard to convince everyone that hydroxychloroquine is a miracle cure, neither of which are about Trumpā€™s own bank account.

The first is that Trump is listening to all the wrong people. We know that he finds those with advanced degrees extremely intimidating, activating his contempt and envy for experts. Sowhen all the doctors and public health experts and epidemiologists tell him that while we can look into the potential of hydroxychloroquine, thereā€™s no reason to think itā€™s going to be transformative, it makes him more, not less, convinced that it must be spectacular.Trump compensates for his own insecurity by working to convince himself and everyone else that the experts donā€™t know what theyā€™re talking about, and he knows more than them about everything. As he said in an appearance at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, ā€œEvery one of these doctors said, ā€˜How do you know so much about this?ā€™ Maybe I have a natural ability.ā€ The scientists standing with him neither burst out in laughter nor began weeping uncontrollably, a tribute to their self-control. So who is he listening to? Hereā€™s an excerpt from a recent New York Times article:

Mr. Trump first expressed interest in hydroxychloroquine a few weeks ago, telling associates that Mr. [Larry] Ellison, a billionaire and a founder of Oracle, had discussed it with him. At the time, Dr. Mehmet Oz, the host of televisionā€™s ā€œThe Doctor Oz Show,ā€ was in touch with Mr. Trumpā€™s advisers about expediting approval to use the drug for the coronavirus.

Mr. [Rudolph] Giuliani has urged Mr. Trump to embrace the drug, based in part on the advice of Dr. Vladimir Zelenko, a self-described simple country doctor who has become a hit on conservative media after administering a cocktail of hydroxychloroquine, the antibiotic azithromycin and zinc sulfate.

So: Trump is getting his medical advice from CEOs, a TV doctor who has been assailed for promoting ā€œquack treatments,ā€ and Giuliani. One of Giulianiā€™s main sources of information on this topic is a guy who runs a company providing medical supplies to cruise ships and who was once sentenced to a year in jail for extorting Steven Seagal.

Supplementing this medical dream team, Fox News and other conservative media have been relentlessly hyping hydroxychloroquine, both on the air and in person. As The Post reports:

Fox host Laura Ingraham and two doctors who are regular on-air guests in what she dubs her ā€˜medicine cabinetā€™ visited the White House last Friday for a private meeting with Trump to talk up the drug.

This creates a feedback loop with Trumpā€™s brain: He talks about it so Fox talks about it, and he watches them talk about it and becomes more convinced that heā€™s right about it.

But thatā€™s only a partial explanation for Trumpā€™s enthusiasm for hydroxychloroquine. The most important factor is that heā€™s desperate,he wants to come out of this a hero and itā€™s the only drug heā€™s heard of that might give him the opportunity.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/04/07/real-reason-trump-is-obsessed-with-hydroxychloroquine/