With help from Fox News and Elon Musk, a misleading French study prompted a wave of misinformation that made its way to the president
This weekend, Donald Trump used his daily White House coronavirus briefings to again urge Americans to take hydroxychloroquine, an anti-malaria drug that has not been shown to be safe or effective against Covid-19.
The story of how hydroxychloroquine was anointed the Trump administration’s miracle drug for the coronavirus pandemic is a distinctly modern tale of misinformation within a global information ecosystem beset by widespread uncertainty, fear, media fragmentation and hyper-partisanship. Belief in the drug’s potential to cure patients infected with the virus followed an extraordinary trajectory from a small study conducted in France (Trump’s “very good test”) to Silicon Valley social media influencers, Fox News and the largest bully pulpit: the White House.
“It was an attempt by Nero to sustain his legitimacy in the midst of this catastrophic event,” Shakow said. “Epidemics are dangerous to rulers.”
A deeply flawed study
In early March, as the coronavirus pandemic accelerated its spread around the globe, a group of scientists in Marseille, France, launched an experiment to see whether hydroxychloroquine, a well-known old malaria drug, could be what everyone was searching for: a cure.
Trump made his first endorsement of hydroxychloroquine on 19 March. Export controls, shortages, overdoses and scientific recriminations rapidly ensued, but the controversy could not extinguish the power of presidentially endorsed hope. Across the globe and throughout diverse communities on the internet, hydroxychloroquine had been anointed the miracle cure for Covid-19.
The only problem? The study that all this fervid hope is based on doesn’t show what its authors claim it does.
From Silicon Valley to Fox News
So how did one interesting but flawed study out of the south of France make its way to Fox News’s prime time and the White House?
It was not surprising that scientists were interested in testing hydroxychloroquine (and its close relative, chloroquine), a well-known and understood drug, as a potential treatment against Covid-19. It is one of a number of possible treatments that scientists in China and South Korea looked at in the early stages of the coronavirus outbreak, including in vitro (ie lab-based) experiments that showed promising (though not conclusive) results. The drug was also selected as one of four that the World Health Organization included in its large-scale international clinical trial.
America’s right wing piles on
Once Trump declared himself a proponent of hydroxychloroquine, the scientific debate over the drug was drowned out by a decidedly partisan one.
Rightwing media outlets have followed Fox News’s lead (an analysis by Media Matters found that the cable news channel promoted using the drug 109 times between 23 and 25 March) to become staunch proponents of the drug, from digital outrage factories such as the Daily Caller and the Daily Wire to the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal.
“These drugs are helping our coronavirus patients,” declared the headline of the Journal op-ed, which was written by two physicians from Kansas, Jeff Colyer and Daniel Hinthorn. The pair wrote that they had been treating patients with hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin, and encouraged others to do so too “as a matter of clinical practice” once a patient tests positive. They also recommended using the drug prophylactically for healthcare workers.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/06/hydroxychloroquine-trump-coronavirus-drug