President Donald Trump’s desperation to sell anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for coronavirus took a seedy turn when Trump tried to set up what amounted to a drug deal for one of his Mar-a-Lago buddies.
Trump had been obsessed with pushing the drug as a “miracle cure” for weeks until he finally backed away from it, after multiple studies showed that it can cause heart failure and other dangerous side-effects. Even the leading cardiologist at the Mayo Clinic warned against using it.
But the opposition to the drug from health officials did not stop Trump from trying to foist it on states and hospitals, and it turns out he even tried to help one of his acquaintances get rich off of it by giving him California Governor Gavin Newsom’s private cell phone number.
That’s right. Trump apparently handed out Newsom’s private number to vitamins executive Keith Frankel so that Frankel could call him and promote a purchase of hydroxychloroquine, a move that would go around official channels for doing such business.
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According to the Washington Post:
Trump at times went to extreme lengths to promote hydroxychloroquine. Keith Frankel, a vitamins executive who occasionally socializes with Trump at his Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Fla., said the president asked him to call California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) on his cellphone and try to make a deal for the nation’s largest state to buy millions of tablets of hydroxychloroquine from an Indian manufacturer. Frankel said he got Newsom’s phone number from Trump.
Frankel was not working through official U.S. government channels, according to a senior government official. California did not agree to take the drugs being offered, Frankel said, adding that after consulting with Trump he also spoke to hospital officials in New Jersey and the state health commissioner in New York.”
So, Trump gave his blessing to a Mar-a-Lago vitamin executive buddy to peddle hydroxychloroquine to California and other states and handed out Newsom’s private phone number like candy. Does he hand out these private numbers to all his friends?
Thankfully, California has a governor who gives a sh*t about the health of the citizens in his state, which is why the deal was rejected. But if Trump had his way, people would be dying across California from taking a drug that never should have been promoted as a treatment for coronavirus, and all while he and his buddy would have made a profit, just like a common drug dealer.
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