Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Trump again touts disproven drug
Social media sites take down video on COVID-19 treatment
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump’s attempt to project a more serious tone about the coronavirus lasted for about a week.
On Tuesday, he resumed spreading misinformation about how to fight the virus and amplifying criticism of Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, who said he would keep his head down and do his job.
Social media platforms worked to remove multiple versions of a video promoted by Trump that included unproven claims about treating people who test positive for the virus.
As he often does, the president used Twitter, where he has more than 84 million followers, to sow fresh doubt about the most effective ways to treat COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, and risked undermining his own recent admonitions to wear masks and maintain a social distance while hoping a vaccine will emerge in the coming months.
Trump retweeted a series of tweets advocating for the anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine to be used in COVID-19 patients, including a video of a doctor claiming to have successfully used the drug on hundreds of patients.
Numerous studies have shown that hydroxychloroquine is not effective, and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration recently withdrew an order that allowed the drug’s use as a emergency treatment.
Trump also shared a post from the Twitter account for a podcast hosted by Steve Bannon, a former top White House adviser to
Trump, accusing Fauci of misleading the public over hydroxychloroquine.
Fauci, a leading member of the White House coronavirus task force, responded to Trump’s tweets during an appearance Tuesday on ABC’s “Good Morning America.”
“I go along with the FDA,” said Fauci, the longtime director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases. “The overwhelming prevailing clinical trials that have looked at the efficacy of hydroxychloroquine have indicated that it is not effective in coronavirus disease.”
Asked if he can do his job while Trump publicly questions his credibility, Fauci said Tuesday he will press ahead “no matter what” because of the stakes involved.
“I don’t tweet. I don’t even read them, so I don’t really want to go there,” Fauci said. “I just will continue to do my job no matter what comes out because I think it’s very important. We’re in the middle of a crisis with regard to an epidemic, a pandemic. This is what I do. This is what
I’ve been trained for my entire professional life, and I’ll continue to do it.”
Asked about claims he’s been misleading the public, Fauci said: “I have not been misleading the American public under any circumstances.”
Trump shared a tweet of a video that’s circulating on social media pushing misleading claims about hydroxychloroquine. Earlier in the pandemic, Trump advocated vigorously for hydroxychloroquine to be used as a treatment, or even a preventative, telling people, “What have you got to lose?”
Trump also said he took a 14-day course of the drug.
In the video, Dr. Stella Immanuel, a physician from Houston, promotes hydroxychloroquine as a sure-fire cure for the coronavirus. She claims to have successfully treated 350 people “and counting,” including some with underlying medical conditions.
“You don’t need masks, there is a cure,” Immanuel says in the video. “You don’t need people to be locked down.” She was among a group called “America’s Frontline Doctors” who made misleading claims about the virus at a news conference Monday in Washington.
The president’s oldest son, Donald Trump Jr., and others shared video of the event on Facebook and Twitter, prompting both companies to step in and remove the content as part of an aggressive push to keep the sites free of potentially harmful information about the virus.
Twitter put Trump Jr.’s account on a 12-hour timeout. He was also required to delete the tweet before he would be reinstated. Twitter declined to say when the timeout began.
Simone Gold, one of the doctors at the event, complained about censorship Tuesday, tweeting that “there are always opposing views in medicine.”
“Treatment options for COVID-19 should be debated, and spoken about among our colleagues in the medical field,” she wrote. “They should never, however, be censored and silenced.”
Others stressed the differences between medical opinion and peer-reviewed scientific studies.
Facebook, Twitter and YouTube began scrubbing their sites of the video Monday because it includes misleading claims about hydroxychloroquine and glosses over the dangers of taking it. But dozens of versions of the video remain live on their platforms, with conservative news outlets, groups and internet personalities sharing it on their pages, where users have viewed them millions of times.
One version of the video had more than 17 million views before Facebook took it down.
In another video shared widely on Twitter by a pro-Trump nonprofit, Immanuel claims Fauci and CNN anchors are secretly taking hydroxychloroquine and challenges them to give her a urine sample.