seems important

just not sure how to present it.

https://archive.is/rbBRz

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/05/documents-expose-fda-commissioners-interventions-on-behalf-of-trump

“I’ll Send You the Contact”: Documents Expose FDA Commissioner’s Personal Interventions on Behalf of Trump’s Favorite Chloroquine Doctor

It was Sunday, April 5, and Dr. Stephen Hahn, the commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, faced a world of problems. Less than two months after the first American death from COVID-19, the U.S. health care system was under siege, with more than 300,000 confirmed cases of the new disease—the most of any nation in the world—and almost 10,000 deaths. Hahn was under fire over faulty test kits the FDA had approved, and angry members of Congress were demanding that his agency prevent the hoarding of an old malaria drug called hydroxychloroquine, which President Trump was hyping without evidence as a miracle cure.

Nevertheless, Dr. Hahn found time that afternoon to carry out an unusual mission. He contacted an obscure family practitioner in Monroe, New York, with whom he had never before been in touch, to ask if the doctor had “time for a quick call.” Once on the phone with Dr. Vladimir Zelenko, Hahn posed a question: How could he—the commissioner of a federal health agency with a $5.7 billion annual budget and the responsibility to safeguard the nation’s drugs, medical devices, and food supply—be of help?

Zelenko was a 46-year-old “simple country doctor,” as he described himself to the New York Times, who claimed to have witnessed positive results after prescribing a cocktail of drugs including hydroxychloroquine to patients in the Orthodox Jewish community of Kiryas Joel, New York. His message aligned perfectly with the pronouncements Trump had been making from the White House podium: that hydroxychloroquine, when used early and liberally, was a game-changing treatment for COVID-19. That, in turn, had earned Zelenko a growing platform on right-wing media.

Two days after that first phone call, in a series of text messages obtained by Vanity Fair, Zelenko returned to Hahn for help setting up a clinical trial of some 750 outpatients at St. Francis Hospital in Roslyn, New York. “The Catholic Health System (St. Francis Hospital) / Dr Zelenko COVID-19 trial is ready to go,” Zelenko wrote to Hahn, copying one of the hospital’s doctors involved in the trial. “We need ASAP 1. Hydroxychloroquine 200mg. 10000 pills 2. Azithromycin 500mg 5000 pills 3. Zinc sulfate 220 mg 5000 pills This treatment will be deployed in outpatient primary care.”