Donald Trump tones down the hydroxychloroquine miracle cure hype

President Donald Trump and his allies in conservative media have subtly scaled down their hyping of hydroxychloroquine as a potential cure for the coronavirus.

Although Trump had repeatedly promoted the decades-old malaria drug since the early days of the disease’s outbreak in the United States, his public statements regarding hydroxychloroquine have diminished significantly over the past week for reasons that remain unclear.

His most recent mention of the drug at the White House’s daily coronavirus news conferences came last Tuesday, when the president announced his administration had deployed roughly 28 million doses of hydroxychloroquine from the federal government’s Strategic National Stockpile.

Earlier at that same briefing, though, the president also trumpeted remdesivir, another experimental treatment developed by the biopharmaceutical company Gilead, and spoke positively of its “promising results.”

Trump invoked hydroxychloroquine at a separate White House event Tuesday, when he met with a group of Americans who had recovered from Covid-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, and pressed some of the guests on whether they or their family members had used the drug.

“So you took the hydroxy?” he asked one of the former patients, later following up: “Why did you take the hydroxy? Why did you do that? You saw it on television?” Trump has frequently advocated on behalf of hydroxychloroquine from the podium of the White House briefing room, and Fox News hosts have touted the drug in numerous on-air segments.

“It’s a very strong, powerful medicine. But it doesn’t kill people. We have some very good results and some very good tests,” Trump told reporters earlier this month, adding: “What really do we have to lose?” While hydroxychloroquine is effective at treating conditions such as lupus and rheumatoid arthritis, the drug can be dangerous for people with certain heart conditions.

Apart from the president’s two public appearances Tuesday, Trump scarcely mentioned hydroxychloroquine last week — if at all — and refrained entirely from invoking the drug during White House briefings on Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday. The White House declined to comment for this story.

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