Trump Derangement Syndrome might be a silly term, but the phenomenon itself was real. Almost every time the former president opened his mouth, members of the media and expert class would run forward with their list of reasons why he was wrong — before actually checking to see if he was.
The immediate condemnation of hydroxychloroquine, an antimalarial drug touted by Trump during the early days of the pandemic, is a great example. Trump claimed that the drug could be used as an effective treatment against COVID-19, and within minutes, there were dozens of headlines slamming him for pushing an “unproven” and “disproved” medication. The health experts agreed and warned the public that hydroxychloroquine, a drug that had been in common use for more than 60 years, could be “dangerous.”
As a result, the Food and Drug Administration pulled its emergency use authorization for the drug and suspended trials testing its effectiveness. The World Health Organization urged the international community to abandon using hydroxychloroquine. And Twitter even restricted the account of Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr., because he posted a video of several doctors touting the effectiveness of the drug, which amounted to “spreading misleading and potentially harmful misinformation,” according to the social media giant.
Well, a new study suggests they were wrong and that Trump was right. Research published by medRxiv this week found that hydroxychloroquine, when paired with azithromycin, could increase the coronavirus survival rate by nearly 200% in ventilated patients who have a severe version of COVID-19.
“We found that when the cumulative doses of two drugs, HCQ and AZM, were above a certain level, patients had a survival rate 2.9 times the other patients,” the study’s conclusion reads.
It is true that hydroxychloroquine was unproven against the coronavirus at the time Trump was pushing its use, and there is a strong argument to be made that Trump should have been more restrained when touting a potential therapeutic for a virus about which we knew very little. But there was plenty of evidence last year that Trump was on to something, evidence that should have prevented the experts from dismissing his claims outright.
In early April, a French study showed that hydroxychloroquine was safe and effective in lowering the virus count at times when used in combination with zinc. A few months later, the Henry Ford Health System published a study that showed hydroxychloroquine helped its severely ill coronavirus patients recover. Dr. Marcus Zervos, the division head of infectious disease for the hospital, said 26% of those not given hydroxychloroquine died, compared to 13% of those who got the drug. Zervos also said patients treated with hydroxychloroquine experienced very few adverse side effects, such as heart problems, which was one of the scientific community’s biggest concerns.
And in June, another study, this one claiming that hydroxychloroquine was both dangerous and ineffective, was retracted and slammed as a “monumental fraud.”
We still don’t know for sure whether hydroxychloroquine really works against COVID-19 because there’s a lot of contradictory information out there. But this uncertainty should have forced the media and the scientific community to approach the subject with a bit more nuance. Instead, they ran with the narrative that was opposite Trump’s and ignored all of the data pointing in his direction.
This irresponsibility has further undermined the credibility of the crowd of experts we once trusted. Even worse, if this latest study is right and hydroxychloroquine can actually make a difference, their negligence may have also cost people their lives. There’s nothing silly about that.
CORRECTION: In a previous version of this article, the Washington Examiner reported that zinc worked in correlation with hydroxychloroquine, when the original medRxiv article was referring to azithromycin. The Washington Examiner regrets the error.
