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This is the bizarre and deep-rooted phenomenon driving the right's coronavirus miracle-cure mania

Accepted submission by aristarchus at 2020-04-04 05:19:12
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Interesting commentary over at Salon: Behind the Rights Obsession with a Miracle Cure for Corona Virus [salon.com].

Adblocker blocking, so sorry Salon.

I get my version from RawStory [rawstory.com].

But leads to a whole bunch of covfefe on the oranges of the hydroxychloroquine promotion by Fox News, and one of their least intelligent viewers. From Media Matters [mediamatters.org]:

Medical experts, including coronavirus task force member Dr. Anthony Fauci, have cautioned that there's only anecdotal evidence to support the use of these drugs for coronavirus treatment and that further medical trials are needed. Meanwhile, promotion by Fox News and Trump has already led to a shortage of these drugs for patients who need them to treat other conditions, and a man in Arizona died after ingesting an aquarium cleaner containing chloroquine phosphate.

Over the last week, some in right-wing media followed Fox News' lead in promoting the drug and arguing that the media is downplaying their effectiveness simply because Trump is promoting them.

      Fox News has spent far more time promoting hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine than any other cable news network. Between March 23 and March 25, Fox mentioned the drugs over 100 times and rarely discussed the lack of evidence supporting their use.

Science is hard, and medical science even moreso. If only we had just a miracle cure!
The really sad thing is that the Republicans, those of very little brain who touted "Freedom Fries!" not all that long ago, seem to be falling for a Frenchman's con job. From The Trumpian French Doctor Behind the Chloroquine Hype [slate.com] over at Slate [slate.com]:

Trump may not be aware that the hydroxychloroquine hype is French in origin. The researcher responsible for the "molécule miracle" is Didier Raoult. The founder and director of Institut Hospitalo-Universitaire, or IHU, in Marseille, the 68-year-old Raoult has compiled a sometimes dazzling, sometimes disturbing career that could have been scripted by Marcel Pagnol or Honoré de Balzac.

And on this current Fox News miracle cure cult oranges:

Indeed, the question of verification hovers over Raoult's clinical trial on the effects of hydroxychloroquine on the novel coronavirus. Combining a regimen of Plaquenil—the commercial name of hydroxychloroquine—and an antibiotic, Raoult treated 24 patients at IHU in early March who had tested positive for COVID-19. After six days, the virus had vacated the bodies of three-quarters of those same patients. On March 16, Raoult announced the results not in a scientific journal but in a YouTube video, in which he declared the jig was up for the virus. Predictably, his self-proclaimed victory then ignited the hysteria that has since swept the world and reached as far as the Oval Office.

In France, pharmacies have been overwhelmed by demands for Plaquenil, leading one pharmacist quoted by Le Monde to exclaim: "Perhaps Raoult is right, but instead of taking the time to carry out a serious study, he has given us two months of theatrics."

YouTube, a peeps-reviewed venue for medical research.

If this sounds depressingly familiar, it should. There are several disquieting parallels between the stable genius who claims to "understand that whole scientific world" and the reputed genius who claims to have defeated COVID-19. Like Trump, Raoult has made himself a brand: the outsider who defies a sclerotic and corrupt establishment. Like Trump, Raoult is not just a climate skeptic—in 2013, he declared that climate predictions are "absurd"—but a pandemic skeptic. "Three people in China die from a virus, and that sparks a global alert," he observed in an IHU video. "This is crazy." The video was posted on Jan. 21, just one day before Trump reassured Americans that he had the virus "totally under control."

Raoult has cast his critics as creatures of a kind of état profond, one peopled by "pedantic Parisian doctors" incapable of doing real research. In effect, he has told the world that he alone can fix it. On Sunday, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued an emergency authorization to add the drug to the Strategic National Stockpile, permitting doctors to use it in cases they deem critical. Yet the clinical trials must still run their proper course. For now, Raoult has given unproven hope to millions, uncharted dangers for those afflicted with lupus and rheumatoid arthritis, and unavoidable despair for those who listen to the U.S. president's daily press briefings.

They're not all crazy, just enough of them to screw up the FDA.


Original Submission