The prfound damage of Trump's pushing his "cure" for covid-19

This is published on the website of The Humanist Association of America 3/26/20 
----addenda follows

The deep damage of Trump's promoting the drugs, chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine, effective for treating malaria, has not been broached by the media.  In the widely viewed daily report on this pandemic,  Dr. Fauci, delicately — yet forcefully — pushed back, explaining that there was only anecdotal evidence that the drugs, chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine, may be effective. The dialog between the two, began with Trump saying“I’m a smart guy,”  Fauci,  acknowledging he couldn’t predict the drugs would work.and up saying,  “I feel good about it. And we’re going to see. You’re going to see soon enough.

President Trump has hundreds of million's of fans, those who trust and admire him, in this and many other countries in the world, all fighting this global pandemic.  Trump is, in fact, a smart man, as he reminds us of frequently, yet he could not explain a principle of epidemiology, "double blind verification of the efficacy of a medical treatment.  Dr. Fauci chose not to go into this, as it would have damaged their tacit agreement, that he would correct only the very worse of Trump's actions, but would not do or say anything that challenges his authority.

 

Fauci did delicately — yet forcefully — push back; explaining that there was only "anecdotal evidence that the drugs, chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine, may be effective."  They engaged in a dialogue, that was really a battle of wills between the two, with the President concluding by saying, "Nobody's going to get killed by trying it"

It is certain that those who do have the  Covid-19 will feel better after taking chloroqune.  This is as certain as those who visit Sanctuary of Our Lady of Lourdes to genuflect at the shrine do actually feel better, with some even living a bit longer based on their emotional boost.  This a beneficial side of the "placebo effect" but there is also the vast harm that is done when there is widespread belief in a nostrum, a cure that is actually of no curative value. 

There is another dimension, more profound and devastating that has been ignored by the media.  Trump is known for his spreading hatred against institutions, such as the free press, the protection of the first amendment not limiting his calumny of any critical report defined as being "fake."  Trump's introduction and enthusiasm for chloroqune is already having the effect of causing shortages for those with diseases that this actually helps..  

This "blessing" of this medication by President Trump will divert his acolytes, which  are not a small group, to shift see this untested medication as a cure for this fatal disease.  The painful and distressing treatment that now is the only one that works, is excruciating for many, a version of national "lockdown." where the entire public is in virtual house arrest.  The emotional distress, even beyond the actual inability to acquire necessities of living, is not a trivial matter. 

While Trump is an intelligent man, he knows nothing about epidemiology. But ignorance about an area has never deterred his asserting expertise, made more vivid in his own mind by his never bringing into conversations those who have spent their careers in delving into complex areas, examples being Global Climate Change, the technology of evolving military weaponry or colonization of our planetary system.

Tragically, President Trump, by making specific suggestions of treatment for this pandemic, has politicize this tragic challenge to the world.   Even if he eventually softens his enthusiasm for this drug, there is no reason to believe this will not have been assimilated by his base, and perhaps those of his style of leadership in other  countries.    

This seemingly benign recommendation, based on the divisiveness of our country, will only fuel such hatred that is little affected by the outcome of a few tests that are ongoing, among international venues. The brief effort of Trump uniting our country against a common enemy, his proudly stating on multiple occasions, "I'm now a war president" is only a fragile conceit, as he does not seem to understand the very concept.  

 The ancient Hippocratic Oath of physicians starts with, "First, Do No Harm."   This must not be breached, especially by a President who is asserting his role as Physician in Chief in a war that he can't begin to understand.

------------The following is addenda to the above article------------------------  

This quote that couldn't be located for the Humanist article, is from this CNN article, ""The nice part is," he (Trump) said last week, "it's been around for a long time, so we know that if things don't go as planned, it's not going to kill anybody."  

More important is this report just posted in the NY Times, No, These Medicines Cannot Cure Coronavirus, it includes this:

As psychiatrists, we are worried about the shocking increase in people self-medicating with these drugs. To emphasize this point: These are not harmless medications. They could have serious consequences — like death.

Doctors have known for decades that chloroquine and related medications like hydroxychloroquine and mefloquine can cause psychiatric side effects even after just one dose. While some patients experience mild anxiety, insomnia and nightmares, others have severe symptoms like personality changes, paranoia, hallucinations and even suicidal thoughts.

Extensive testing of chloroquine is proceeding outside of agencies such as the World Health Organization that Dr Fauci heads.  This is sponsored by the founder of Oracle, Larry Ellison, in defiance of the recommendation of the medical research community, as described in this article.

=ll the leading immortalists started out in tech, and all had a father who died young (as Ray Kurzweil’s did when he was twenty-two), or absconded early (as Aubrey de Grey’s did before he was born). They share an early loss of innocence and a profound faith that the human mind can perfect even the human body. Larry Ellison, the co-founder of Oracle, lost his adoptive mother to cancer when he was in college—and later donated three hundred and seventy million dollars to aging research. “Death has never made any sense to me,” he told a biographer. “How can a person be there and then just vanish?” Bill Maris, who conceived of Calico, said that, when he pondered the inevitability of death, “I felt it was maybe our mission here to transcend that, and to preserve consciousness indefinitely.”
Immortalists fall into two camps. Those who might be called the Meat Puppets, led by de Grey, believe that we can retool our biology and remain in our bodies. The RoboCops, led by Kurzweil, believe that we’ll eventually merge with mechanical bodies and/or with the cloud. Kurzweil is a lifelong fixer and optimizer: early in his career, he invented the flatbed scanner and a machine that reads books aloud to the blind. Those inventions have improved dramatically in subsequent iterations, and now he’s positive that what he calls “the law of accelerating returns” for human longevity is about to kick in.
I met with Kurzweil at Google, where he is a director of engineering, but he emphasized that he was speaking in his private capacity as a futurist. Though a few days short of his sixty-ninth birthday, he looked much younger. After discovering, in his thirties, that he had Type 2 diabetes, he changed his life style radically and began taking supplements. He swallows some ninety pills a day, including metformin; Basis; a coenzyme called Q10, for muscle strength; and phosphatidylcholine, to keep his skin supple. “How does it look?” he asked me, plucking at his forearm. “Supple!” I said.
Kurzweil thinks of such efforts, which attempt to slow aging by using current technology, as Bridge One to indefinite longevity. But he also subscribes to the belief that the body is essentially a computer made up of overwritable data and updatable apps. Therefore, we’ll soon be in the midst of a biotech revolution, which will offer personally tailored immune therapies for cancer as well as organs grown from our own DNA. This is Bridge Two, which he believes will bring us to longevity escape velocity within about fifteen years. “I’m actually a little more optimistic than Aubrey,” he said. Bridge Three, which he expects us to cross by the two-thousand-thirties, is nanobots—blood-cell-size devices that will roam the body and the brain, cleaning up all the damage that de Grey wants to fix with medical interventions. “I used to call it the killer app of health technology,” Kurzweil said, “but that’s not a good name.”