“For two months, President Trump repeatedly pitched hydroxychloroquine as a safe and effective treatment for coronavirus, asking would-be patients “What the hell do you have to lose?”
“Growing evidence shows that, for many, the answer is their lives.”
Medicynical note: A stopped clock is right twice a day…….Trump is certainly due. As you recall this is the guy who thought the virus would go away by itself; that it was a hoax; that he didn’t need the pandemic planning team kindly left by President Obama; that he didn’t need the detailed response plan also provided by his predecessor; that his administration could ignore the warning from President Obama that there was a significant risk of a pandemic. He ignored it all.
And now his “game changer” treatment recommendation, unsurprisingly, turns out to be bogus. It doesn’t work and has fatal side effects.
Which brings us to the vaccine which Trump is certain will be ready by the end of the year. Maybe he is right. There are many good people working on it. But almost all think it will take more time.
I would suggest extreme caution in the use of such an early vaccine. First, like the yearly flu vaccines it may not offer complete protection. And given the truncated development time it may have undiscovered side-effects. In addition, any such vaccine has the unprecedented Trumpian track record of inflated false claims, sloppy reasoning, thousands of lies and repeated failures to overcome.
Medicynic 