Until yesterday, as much as I dislike the guy, I never thought that Trump was in any way a threat to this country, for the simple reason that when you got past the bluster and the bullshit, what you had was a President who seemed to sit around watching television all day long.
In other words, he didn’t hurt the country because he didn’t really do anything, okay?
I no longer hold such a benign view of Trump after reading the report issued by the House Select Committee on how he tried to push hydroxychloroquine as a remedy for Covid-19. You can download and read the report right here.
Trump and his minions began touting hydroxychloroquine when the alt-right began making noise about the government mandating vaccinations against Covid-19. Even though Trump was pushing this phony ‘warp speed’ plan to have vaccinations on the market asap, he also needed to cover his ass with the resistance to lockdowns and mandates by the MAGA crowd.
There was only one little problem with this brilliant idea, however. And the problem was that not only didn’t hydroxychloroquine provide any immunity against the ‘Chinese flu,’ it actually made things worse for some Covid victims who ingested the drug.
When the CDC’s main man Fauci came out against substituting patent medicine for real medicine, the battle was joined. And Trump did what he always did when he encountered resistance to any of his hare-brained schemes or scams, he got the alt-right noise machine ramped up in his defense.
The two biggest noisemakers working for Trump to promote hydroxychloroquine were Peter Navarro and Dr. Steven Hatfill, both of whom really got to work after the FDA revoked an emergency use authorization (EUA) that had been issued for hydroxychloroquine and was still in effect as the 2020 election drew near. Not only did these two characters engage the alt-right noise machine (Bannon, Ingraham, et. al.) to promote the drug, they consciously covered up the role of the White House in this effort as well.
Peter Navarro, you may recall, was Trump’s foreign trade adviser who had absolutely no medical training or medical experience at all. Hatfill is a virologist and bio-weapons expert, who has been floating around the murky world of chemical warfare for years. Want to read about the shabbiest statement on anything having to do with public health or Covid-19 that Hatfill published in 2021? Try this one on for size.
Incidentally, another member of the pro-hydroxychloroquine gang who tried to pressure the FDA to issue another EUA for hydroxychloroquine before the 2020 election was none other than Dr, Mehmet Oz. He’ll be on the Pennsylvania ballot in two months running for the Senate to succeed retiring Senator Pat Toomey, and he’s one of the reasons that Mitch McConnell has said the GOP doesn’t have enough qualified candidates to shift the Senate from blue to red.
Don’t get me wrong. Every President always tries to generate positive support for his ideas and plans. Bush pushed the WMD stuff, Obama tried to do it with the ACA, sometimes it works, sometimes it don’t.
But we’re not talking about a new law to push drug prices down, we’re not talking about privatizing social security.
We’re talking about life and death for hundreds and thousands of people and the decisions that every one of them made or had to make about a massive threat to their health.
If you’re the President with unparalleled access to media, you don’t call Anthony Fauci a ‘liar’ on TV. You don’t push a phony medicine because the real medicines – vaccines – won’t be rolled out before voters go to the polls.
All of these issues and other ways that Trump attempted to politicize a medical response to a pandemic of unmitigated proportions are covered in detail in the House Select Committee’s report.
If you think that Trump committed crimes by how he planned the January 6th riot, his behavior regarding the Covid-19 issue was much, much worse.
How many people lost their lives in connection with January 6th? Try seven.
How many Americans have died from what Trump called the ‘kung flu?’ As of this morning the count stands at 1,041,466.