Throughout the life-shattering COVID-19 pandemic, then-President Donald Trump not only floated, but heavily and openly pushed the ideas of countless ridiculous, unhinged, and often dangerous “magic” cures to bring the fatal and rapidly-spreading virus to its knees and make himself the hero of the world — none of which where actually even remotely successful, in the slightest.
At the height of the pandemic, we heard suggestions from the literal President of the United States ranging from injecting bleach into your body to using lightbulbs… Internally.
Among those hair-brained fix-it-quick schemes was the idea of treating the deadly virus with hydroxychloroquine — an immunosuppressive and anti-parasitic drug that’s used to treat and/or prevent ailments ranging from Malaria to Lupus and arthritis.
Now, former White House chief medical adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci, who served within the Trump Administration during the height of COVID-19, is speaking out with a new claim about where Donald Trump got that particular idea to begin with.
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Fauci recently made an appearance on MSNBC, where he spoke with host Ari Melber about his troubled relationship with Donald Trump during his time as one of the most prominent lead members of the Trump Admin’s Coronavirus Task Force:
I felt very uncomfortable when he was saying it was going to disappear like magic, it’s just going to go away because he so desperately wanted it to disappear the way flu disappears as you enter the end of the winter and the beginning of the spring. And that’s when I had to publicly get up, which was very uncomfortable for me. I was not happy about criticizing the president or disagreeing with the president. I said, ‘No, it’s not going to disappear like magic at all.’ And when that became clear, that’s when we started talking about hydroxychloroquine, which also was something that had no basis in science.
He would start saying things, you know, ‘I care about you, I like you, I love you,’ but then he would start screaming at me, which, you know, it’s not fun being yelled at by the president of the United States. That was a bit unnerving. But I had to continue to tell the truth. And he said, ‘Why do you keep doing this to me?’ Because it’s the truth. I’m telling the American public the facts. Hydroxychloroquine doesn’t work.”
Eventually, their discussion turned to the topic of hydroxychloroquine, specifically, prompting Dr. Fauci to explain:
I believe he wanted so badly for this to go away the way influenza goes away, and when he saw it was not going away, then he was hoping for some magical solution, and he even used those words, ‘It’s going to go away like magic.’ And then when that didn’t work, then we had to have these miracle cures like hydroxychloroquine, which he got from Laura Ingraham on Fox News.”
Ingraham was, of course, just one of many conservative Right-wing television personalities to basely promote various “cures” and “treatments” for COVID-19 — including hydroxychloroquine — despite not only having absolutely no medical education or knowledge but in direct contradiction to warnings from medical officials that there was little to no evidence that the intense immunosuppressive drug could do any good against COVID-19.
Trump himself repeatedly peddled the notion of hydroxychloroquine as a “cure” for the deadly virus throughout the height of the pandemic and was even said to have used it himself.
However, a scientific study was released in January that actually revealed an 11 percent increase in the mortality rate among those who used hydroxychloroquine to treat COVID-19. According to the study, the anti-malaria drug was linked to a staggering nearly 17,000 deaths across six countries.
Watch a clip of Dr. Fauci’s MSNBC segment here:
Fauci: When that didn’t work then, we had to have these miracle cures like hydroxychloroquine which he got from Laura Ingraham pic.twitter.com/JWCIioGUih
— Acyn (@Acyn) June 18, 2024
Featured image via Political Tribune Gallery
