The former president, Donald Trump, repeatedly promoted the use of hydroxychloroquine in the spring of 2020, as both a preventative against and treatment for Covid-19. He did this despite the drug not having proven effectiveness or safety. According to a study published in the February 2024 issue of the peer-reviewed journal Biomedicine & Pharmacotherapy, the pharmaceutical has now been linked to approximately 17,000 deaths.
The drug known as an anti-malarial for decades, hydroxychloroquine, was prescribed to patients by some doctors during the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic “despite the absence of evidence documenting its clinical benefits.” Authors of a new study estimate that 16,990 Covid-19 patients in the U.S., France, Belgium, Italy, Spain and Turkey died as a result of taking the drug. According to researchers, the toxicity of hydroxychloroquine in patients with Covid-19 is partially due to its severe cardiac side effects.
Former President Trump made it a habit in the spring of 2020 to preside over daily briefings conducted by the White House Coronavirus Task Force, where he continually embraced preventive and therapeutic use of hydroxychloroquine. Notably, the President’s advice directly contradicted guidance from the nation’s federal public health agencies, including the Food and Drug Administration and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
There were plenty of warnings at the time from clinical researchers and senior public health officials alike, including National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci, about the unproven, experimental nature of hydroxychloroquine and the concern that it might do more harm than good.
And this wasn’t the only time Trump gave unsound medical advice to the American people. You may recall when in April 2020 Trump infamously suggested that bleach or other disinfectant chemicals could be useful to combat coronavirus infections. In the spring of 2020, accidental poisonings as a consequence of people ingesting bleach or other household cleaners spiked in America, doubling from their levels a year before.
This takes nothing away from the positive work of the Trump Administration during the Covid-19 pandemic, including its efforts initiating Operation Warp Speed, a public-private partnership to facilitate and accelerate the development, manufacturing, and distribution of Covid-19 vaccines, therapeutics, and diagnostics. This program has been hugely successful, as measured by the pace at which Covid-19 vaccines and treatments were developed and launched.
But Trump’s issuance of unwarranted treatment recommendations left a lot to be desired. All such governmental advice must be tightly regulated and given only by those with the requisite knowledge and expertise.
This is not to say that there aren’t things that could improve at U.S. public health agencies, including messaging by medical experts. But in the end those in government disseminating messages to the public ought to be officials whose expertise isn’t in doubt. They may make mistakes, but they’re qualified practitioners of medicine or have a clinical science background. Trump did not have this. He never should have gone to the podium and addressed the American people touting unproven therapies or dangerous substances.
The moral of this story is that when presidents with no medical expertise contravene public health entities, expect trouble. This is particularly the case when a president like Trump takes center stage, upstaging rigorously trained medical professionals rather than leaving all actual healthcare decisions and guidance up to them.
