Given his mention of disinfectants at the same time, it's far more likely they just told him how they disinfect surfaces like doorknobs and countertops and he ran with it.
But then he does things like this that reveal he's actually a bit on the dumb side. I don't think there's any other way to square that.
Whether it's the anti-intellectualist trend that lurks in some segments of the US population, or the way that the Republican party successfully intertwined themselves into American religious institutions several decades ago to make Republican party loyalty be perceived as an odd form of "cultural-Christian" piety by many who were swept up by the "religious Right" and "moral majority" movements, or the straight-up disinformation campaigns targeted at the most willful audiences....not one factor was tied to Trump being a good people leader or an intelligent strategist. It's more that he was the guy that happened to be there when a confluence of other efforts came to fruition, and he was crazy/manipulable/stupid enough to be useful for the role of "candidate".
It is easy to square; it's social class. It's very important to a rather large segment of the country that it feel intellectually superior. He provokes them into talking about how superior they are, and that shores up his base.
One further dynamic.. people in the media and professional classes can be destroyed by using the wrong word or by speculating off-handedly. That is why they flip out when Trump does it. It's partially envy of his freedom.
This is a horrible attribute in a president, who constantly has to deal with an array of issues that no one person could ever be expert in.
Would you say the same thing about NNT or Socrates?
> The man who said "The only thing I know is that I know nothing" is a far cry from the man who said "I know more than the generals do".
But I didn't think of it at the time.
> But then he does things like this that reveal he's actually a bit on the dumb side.
The second thing is part of the reason he achieved the first thing. His smarts is knowing what sells to his base, and what consolidates them.
Part of that is saying "dumb" or offensive stuff, with a lining of rhetoric that echoes with their anxieties.
>> But then he does things like this that reveal he's actually a bit on the dumb side.
> The second thing is part of the reason he achieved the first thing. His smarts is knowing what sells to his base, and what consolidates them.
> Part of that is saying "dumb" or offensive stuff, with a lining of rhetoric that echoes with their anxieties.
I agree and disagree. I think you're right that his "dumbness" helped, but I don't think it was just about saying offensive stuff. It also meant that he was very willing to push polices that were against the status quo consensus (e.g. tariffs [1]), without hemming and hawing. That can appeal strongly to people who feel that the status quo hurts them.
It's usually smart to play it safe, which means not straying too far from the status quo and only risk the minimum you think is required for victory. To stray, you either have to be really smart (come up with a brilliant bet no one else sees), or really dumb (not realizing there are safer bets to achieve your goal). Trump was the latter.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/politics/first-draft/2016/01/07/dona...
I guess I'm not convinced that it's easy to differentiate the two.
I'm no supporter of the current POTUS, but I think his reality-TV derived smarts are indeed a kind of "smarts", in the same way that con-artists, or even popular show-runners are very smart. For one thing, they know their audience.
Of course it's a disaster in our current situation, but I don't think he won the office through pure idiocy.
I guess I don't buy that it's dumb, in the same way that I don't think Infowars pushing its fake covid19 cures and treatments is dumb, even if it is ethically reprehensible.
That's basically what he did during the election. He honed in on the single worst characteristic about the other candidates, "Low Energy Jeb", "Lyin' Ted", "Crooked Hillary", etc. And it worked.
The problem is that he's a salesman, he's not an intellectual. So a lot of the stuff he says is off the cuff and colloquial which is dangerous and unpresidential. He succeeded in business by bullying his opponents and using his power against them by squeezing them. But it's not something that works in politics, because his opponents are generally much smarter than he is.
Is there actually a codified set of instructions on what is "presidential" and what is not? Otherwise we descend into the domain of things being verboten and the retort of "well it's common sense" and so forth.
Not that it actually mattered, given the way the US electoral process works, but the premise that Clinton was overwhelmingly unpopular is an exaggeration. She just wasn't popular enough in the right states.
It's true that a lot of Democrats wanted Bernie Sanders, but I suspect more of them flipped to Hillary Clinton than to Donald Trump.
If "people didn't want Clinton", they wanted Trump even less.
E.g. when Trump says there were "very fine people, on both sides" of a white supremacist rally, what should we make of that? Should we quibble over implausible re-interpretations of his words and conclude that maybe he meant something other than what's obvious? Should we say hey, okay, maybe Nazism and white supremacist movements deserve another look because, like, everything's relative, man, you know?
When Trump uses racist and sexist dogwhistles (e.g. "a young woman governor") to denigrate to his political opponents, what's the takeaway there? Is that okay? Is that a man worthy of respect, of sitting in the Oval Office?
When Trump suggests that we should inject ourselves with "disinfectant" to cure COVID, am I supposed to conclude that he is so smart I just can't possibly understand the genius behind his words (it's so simple!) or should I throw that on the pile of evidence that he's an ignorant person with no capability and/or inclination for understanding complex issues?
If I thought everything was relative, I'd have to think nothing mattered more than anything else, and the logical next step would be to lay down in my bed and wait for the sweet release of death. We live in a world that is not black and white, but we have to do the best we can to be better people and hold our leaders to high standards. Intellectual honesty is the first step, and it's what the GOP and their more intellectually accomplished adherents lack.
note that empathy here refers to the facet that let's you tease out how people are feeling and what's causing those feelings (to your point), not the one that makes you genuinely care for other people.
with that said, it's unlikely that the election tipping point was honing in on the biggest weakness of an opponent. that's incidental to his real strength in this area, which is honing in on the central fear of--let's not beat around the bush--large blocks of white people.
this is how you make sense of seemingly disparate issues like immigration, nationalism, tax breaks for the wealthy, and anti-abortionism that the trump campaign championed (even if he doesn't personally care about immigration or abortion policy, for example).
trump won by using his sales-honed empathy to zero in on this central fear and then beat that drum relentlessly to victory. clinton, on the other hand, empathized in the other sense of the word (to some extent), but failed at understanding the basic motivations of the populace.
That was my impression before the election, when I didn't pay any attention. I thought he was a successful bully, which wouldn't necessarily be the worst combination for a President.
After learning about his actual business history (Thanks, Trump Inc.! podcast) I think the 'succeeded' part is pretty arguable. He was born unbelievably wealthy, had a string of some unbelievable business failures, and was subsequently bailed out by some known (Deutsche Bank) as well as unknown shady actors and practices.
Now that I understand his business history, I wouldn't consider him to have succeeded in business. He could have been vastly more wealthy today by doing nothing other than invest in index funds, which to me counts as largely unsuccessful.
... Well you start out with 100 million!
I think Trump has been successful. Many people born into wealth lose it or at least don't grow it. So he deserves some kudos here.
I think people don't like to give him credit for anything, but if you "only" grow your fortune at the rate of the market, then you're really tracking the average success of American business. That's by definition better than 50% of public companies and in the top few percent of individuals. That's successful in my books.
This post is attracting quite a bit of negative attention, but I stand by my assessment as fair. If you disagree, maybe you want to point out how it's not fair? I think people just hate Trump (which I do as well, but I can separate concerns.)
Isn't that unknowable without knowing how much he has spent along the way?
- Case A: Donald Trump runs his companies starting at year X and meanwhile leads a lavish lifestyle, ending up with N1 dollars.
- Case B: Donald Trump puts all his money in index funds and spends nothing, ending up with N2 dollars.
As far as I can tell, you are saying N2 > N1, therefore he would have been better off investing in index funds. But you are comparing apples to oranges if you have different spending habits between the cases. It could be that running his private plane or plating things in gold or whatever would have drained his index fund investment totally.
People who can't stand Trump have taken the bait. Deplorable is not a popular word anymore but the reaction to the President's inconsequential meandering does, happily for some, imply that Trump fans are gullible, poor and idiotic.
> But it's not something that works in politics
The first rule of politics is to win elections. He's currently the most powerful politician in the world. Of course it works in politics.
Governing on the other hand...
This depends on what you mean by "works in politics"? He won the presidency after all, and then went on to beat a resistant republican party into submission. He lowered taxes on the rich, packed the supreme court, and is in the process of handing out 6 trillion dollars to wall street. His approval ratings have been constant through impeachment and pandemic [1] and he still has a good shot at reelection.
Assuming you aren't a supporter, I think there is a significant risk in underestimating his political successes. We shall see if Biden and the DNC can "outsmart" him in 2020.
[1] https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/trump-approval-ratings/
All they had to do, arguably, is advance a viable candidate with no glaring weaknesses, and they utterly failed. It's going to be another 4 years of Trump.
Some people love these things about him. And some people don't care. That's why he's president. Not because he has no glaring weaknesses. A turnip has no glaring weaknesses compared to Trump.
He is a D-minus tabloid trash celebrity clown act. Always has been. Always will be. For three years as president, as candidate, before he was in politics, and while he flipped multiple times between being a registered Democrat and Republican, when he wasn't in politics at all. He was always a clown act. He is the most exquisite representative for both his supporters and the people who are non-participants, and in some hilariously perverse sense he's evidence that democracy does work still in America. He properly implicates American culture. Even the fact he lost the popular vote yet still is president, is representative of American culture where you can be a dipshit loser and a bad person, but still make lots of money and be famous, and that's what makes you a winner.
This thread is exactly why Trump is so dangerous to the democratic party. Look at the level of vehenemence and aggression in your post directed at a potential ally.
Guy is a genius level troll in manipulating people and controlling the message. People didn’t get it in 2016, and they don’t get it now.
We’re in for another 4 years if people focus on whatever he twittered today and not their own message. That’s not an election strategy.
It's not just messaging, it's backed up with force. You just haven't experienced that first-hand yet.
In the video linked you can see that he clearly mentioned "disinfectant" then suggested injecting it. There's no other way to spin that.
Disinfect vs disinfectant is a red herring.
The whole quote:
“ Supposing we hit the body with a tremendous, whether it’s ultraviolet or just very powerful light, and I think you said that hasn’t been checked but you’re going to test it. Supposing you brought the light inside of the body, which you can do either through the skin or in some other way. And I think you said you’re going to test that too. Sounds interesting. And then I see the disinfectant where it knocks it out in a minute. And is there a way we can do something, by an injection inside or almost a cleaning? It would be interesting to check that. That you’re gonna have to use medical doctors with.”
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-suggests...
But using that quote to gleefully claim that Trump is suggesting that people inject themselves (which is all your see online right now, esp Twitter and Reddit) is a textbook case of the least charitable interpretation.
If anyone was actually concerned about people injecting themselves with Lysol, they wouldn't publish headlines that put those words in Trump's mouth because you certainly don't get that from listening to the video clip. He's telling his advisor to "look into it", some off-the-cuff dumb hunch.
This kind of coverage does nothing but drive media ad impressions and the division between the voters. It also secures a 2020 Trump victory by being so dishonest.
“My concern is that people will die. People will think this is a good idea,” Craig Spencer, director of global health in emergency medicine at New York-Presbyterian/Columbia University Medical Center, told The Washington Post. “This is not willy-nilly, off-the-cuff, maybe-this-will-work advice. This is dangerous.”
Lysol is worried about it: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/do-not-inject-disinfecta...
And they have cause to be, after the last time Trump spoke about chloroquine and people listening to him consumed aquarium chemicals and died as a result.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/23/health/arizona-coronavirus-ch...
The media has a responsibility to report information of medical experts and no responsibility to be charitable to the President to save him from embarrassment here.
I can guarantee their comms department spent a long time looking at his speech and the fallout from it before deciding that they had to issue this to prevent people from dying.
https://www.rb.com/media/news/2020/april/improper-use-of-dis...
I mean even if UBI and/or ozonetherapy don't work at all and are wildly dangerous, at least Trump knew what they were, which makes him smarter than everyone posting about how they don't even know what he's talking about.
There is zero evidence that Trump has any clue UIB exists.
"And then I said, supposing you brought the light inside the body, which you can do either through the skin or some other way, and I think you said you're going to test that, too."
There are people who do it both ways. As another commenter pointed you, you can buy devices that do the same thing that work inside the body:
1) Trump knew about UBI, a fringe medical practice used primarily in Russia decades ago
2) Trump heard them talking just moments before about how UV light disinfects outdoor surfaces and kills the virus, and that using chemical disinfectants also killed the virus, and then proceeded to talk about how you could inject disinfectant or put UV light inside the body.
Occam's Razor would point us towards the latter. It's just a lot less convoluted to believe he was talking about the same topic the entire prior discussion had been around than to believe he's talking about an obscure and unproven medical practice decades removed from use.
I imagine most of us have been in technical meetings where people who have no idea about the real problem are speaking as if they are the expert. Its incredibly unproductive, and only slows down making real progress and and getting to a real resolution.
Even if he was right, which he is not, he should let his experts speak about these matters and get out of the way.
He has also been culling any form of dissent from his government, so it’s now essentially an echo chamber.
The board is obviously talking about cleaning your living area/homes but uhhh the president thought otherwise.
Edit: Here is an article with the image: https://www.cnet.com/news/trump-suggests-injecting-disinfect...
To be fair to the inarticulate speaker: evidence for the efficacy of chloroquines, sparse and vague though it may have been, was very much more convincing than this stuff. Chloroquines are existing drugs with a long history and a reasonably well understood mechanism of action.
This thing is pure experimental medicine. It wasn't practical at the time, didn't survive as a treatment, and everyone involved in the original research is retired or dead. That doesn't make it wrong, but this is a long way from being ready even for a study.
Almost as if he's using his "inside" voice on the outside - taking "thinking out loud" to a whole new level.
It's very weird for a person in his position, and I'm surprised so many support him (to the point of fanaticism) over in the US. It's like their egos are too deeply invested for them to cut their losses now. Whatever his supporters might say, the guy's a bit of a joke to us here in the UK.
Also, this fails to explain the _disinfectant_.
But after seeing that rambling video of him hypothesizing about disinfectants to clean out the body, I’m convinced he’s actually an idiot.
Not only are there hundreds of doctors in the US who inject disinfectant into people to treat viruses already, there are medical textbooks about it and even an academy for certifying medical practitioners:
(Technically they advocate taking blood from people, infusing it with disinfectant, and then injecting the infused blood back into people, but close enough.)
I don't know to what extent it's safe or effective, but hundreds of thousands of people have done it without dying at this point and many of them credit it for having healed various problems, so that's something.
https://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/cdrh/cfdocs/cfcfr/CFR...
> Ozone is a toxic gas with no known useful medical application in specific, adjunctive, or preventive therapy. In order for ozone to be effective as a germicide, it must be present in a concentration far greater than that which can be safely tolerated by man and animals.
That didn't prevent the rabid anti-Trump media from making it a headline on every site, of course. Which then becomes:
"Trump says inject Lysol!"
Can you please point out the timestamp when Trump attempted to clarify?
The closest I found was at ~31:00, some reporter asks for confirmation that there's no scenario in which disinfectants would be injected into the body. Bryan declines to comment, Trump responds with "maybe it works, maybe it doesn't work," which doesn't really provide any clarity.
And then at ~50:00 he asks Bryan to "talk to the medical doctors" to look at applying light and heat as a cure. Then he says "maybe it works, maybe it doesn't. I'm not a doctor, but I am a person with a very good you-know-what."
Some reporter suggests that the President of the United States should not spout random stuff and say "maybe it works, maybe it doesn't", Trump responds with "I'm the president, and you're fake news."
It's not just a matter of not liking Trump. I don't like Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping, but they're not fools or clowns.
The advisors mentioned the new results that the COVID-19 virus on surfaces is neutralized by disinfectants and direct sunlight in a few minutes. He then tried to 'help' by suggesting to put light and disinfectants in the bloodstream.
In the video you can see that he already discussed with Deborah Birx about these ideas, and instead of her shooting them down, she just told him that she would consider them. During the conference he was trying to bring back that conversation, putting her on the spot.
Note: I am typing this as I sit drinking my daily cup of Lysol. Invigorating and I don't have Covid-19. I have picked up an uncomfortable case of indigestion, but I'm sure it will pass.
Trump has been shown several times however to disregard expert advice and tweet or act based on input from Fox News, so in that way, it’s not really any different.
To act like he is only ever reporting information from experts is the real pure fantasy. He’s much more likely to be citing “opinion” peddlers instead.
I really doubt that.
Now you may be right that he gets his info from advisors but the quality of advice is only as good as the advisors. Considering he has removed a vast number of competent experienced people and replaced them with sycophants with no experience may reduce that quality. His daughter and son in law are special advisors.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/people/ivanka-trump/
Also I did not say he gets his info from facebook, I said he is similar to people who do.
https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-jared-kushner-fa...
Trump has taken a very different approach. Trump has prevented a doctor from responding to questions about its use. Trump was actively saying we have no time for tests, lets just use it. It appears he also fired the director of the US health department’s Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority for not endorsing its use.
To say that meeting with a researcher to gather information is going further than publicly shilling for its use and cracking down on those in his administration who don't advocate for it is going further is very much not accurate.
"Asked about the report, the presidential adviser said Macron had taken note of a certain number of elements presented by the professor and would give it careful consideration, in particular at a meeting with his scientific advisory panel.
Macron has yet to publicly share his opinion on the controversy."
https://www.france24.com/en/20200409-macron-visits-marseille...
Trump said:
"HYDROXYCHLOROQUINE & AZITHROMYCIN, taken together, have a real chance to be one of the biggest game changers in the history of medicine. The FDA has moved mountains - Thank You! Hopefully they will BOTH (H works better with A, International Journal of Antimicrobial Agents)....."
It's reasonably safe assumption that trump didn't suggest infecting disinfectant either, but you're giving the media the benefit of the doubt they don't deserve.
It's not like these people go around and make up excuses for everybody who says something silly.
I'm... At a loss what is going on.
Yet, here we are, being told that we're all morons because it's obvious that this treatment is what he was talking about. Even though he never mentioned this treatment, and there's no reason to think that he was talking about this treatment in particular.
Edit: Trump is claiming today that the question was just "sarcasm"...
Truly extraordinary times we live in.
As a global leader in health and hygiene products, we must be clear that under no circumstance should our disinfectant products be administered into the human body (through injection, ingestion or any other route).
https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/24/business/lysol-disinfectant-t...
I keep thinking of this recent Ted Chiang quote:
If your goal is to dramatize the threat posed by an unknown virus, there’s no advantage in depicting the officials responding as incompetent, because that minimizes the threat; it leads the reader to conclude that the virus wouldn’t be dangerous if competent people were on the job. A pandemic story like that would be similar to what’s known as an “idiot plot,” a plot that would be resolved very quickly if your protagonist weren’t an idiot. What we’re living through is only partly a disaster novel; it’s also—and perhaps mostly—a grotesque political satire.
https://electricliterature.com/ted-chiang-explains-the-disas...
In this case it's not typical incompetence of officials, it's an official with huge influence derived from their office endangering people by recommending injection of disinfectants into their bodies. That itself a huge threat.
Just to clarify one possible misreading of Chiang's point I noticed due to the way I excerpted his statement: he's not suggesting that incompetent officials should not be called out and held accountable.
He's saying rather if you're a fiction writer and you were trying to write a story about a plausible sci-fi pandemic and you added a character like Trump and depicted a scene like that press conference yesterday, you'd literally lose the plot and lose any serious reader. It would unsuspend disbelief.
"So, supposing we hit the body with a tremendous, whether its ultraviolet or just very powerful light, and I think you said, that hasn't been checked but you're gonna test it. And then I said, supposing it brought the light inside the body, which you can either do either through the skin or some other way, and I think you said you're gonna test that too, sounds interesting. And I then I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in one minute, and is there a way you can do something like that by injection inside, or almost a cleaning. Because you see it gets in the lungs, and it does a tremendous number on the lungs. So it'd be interesting to check that."
What does this mean? It certainly sounds to me like he is talking about using disinfectant to clean the virus out of the lungs.
Here's a better link: https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2020/04/23/trump_sug...
> it's clear he never said anything about injecting disinfectant directly into a patient
Here's what Donald Trump said:
> And then I see the disinfectant where it knocks it out in a minute, one minute and is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside or almost a cleaning because you see it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number
Here's what your source had to say about what Donald Trump said:
> spoke about the use of ultraviolet light to fight the virus and an injectable disinfectant that would clean your lungs
The ongoing research Bryan was discussing was not medical research, and had nothing to do with the human body, and yet Donald Trump certainly said someting about injecting disinfectant directly into a patient (or at the very least, it isn't clear that he didn't say that).
> Listen to the remarks, and its clear he never said anything about injecting disinfectant directly into a patient.
does not seem to be correct. That's it.
> You really think he was suggesting that people drink cans of lysol to clean their lungs? That's absurd, and I think you know it
No, I think he was suggesting that using disinfectants as a treatment for COVID-19 is worthy of investigation based on the findings that lysol kills coronavirus.
I mean, happy for him to have those discussions with the experts (as long as it's not me sitting there), but do not do this on live TV.
Funny thing is, this would actually be pretty save [1], especially compared to anyone ingesting disinfectants. And it's orders of magnitudes easier to access disinfectants than reactor pools [2].
[1] https://what-if.xkcd.com/29/ [2] That is an educated guess, actually.
[Edit: Grammar]
The man was literally following up on a conversation about UV and bleach being used as disinfectant on surfaces and then suggested that they might be a good for use on humans. Chemotherapy would sound crazy on it's face - and in a lot of ways it still is, people do die from chemo - but the push for further research for chemo was done by scientists and researchers who had a grasp on why and how it could be of use as a treatment.
It's also disingenuous to compare chemotherapy with injecting disinfectant. It is trivially easy for someone to inject themselves with disinfectant. It is not trivially easy for someone to give themselves chemotherapy. Trump's verbiage here is also the same as his playbook on chloroquine over the past few weeks - frame things as questions to be asked, but then pepper it all with words like "great" and "powerful"
It's the same way he operates on every single subject he's a fan of but can't come outright and say that he likes and wants you to think that way or believe in it. This is nothing new, and neither are the backflips and contortions people go through to try and justify it.
And, fundamentally, your entire argument falls apart now that Trump himself is claiming it was just a sarcastic joke, and that he was never ever suggesting that it's something we should do or even research. He's trying to walk back the statement and pretend he didn't mean anything by it at all except to be mocking because of how stupid the comment was.
Trump said it was a joke today - if you saw the original video he sort of chuckled when he followed up on the UV treatment idea with the suggestion that disinfectant could be used inside the body, turning to his team and saying "but you'd have to use medical doctors for that". Maybe that's what he was referring to, or maybe it was some later exchange. Regardless, the original context was simply that scientists presented some findings about what kills the virus, and Trump followed up with some questions about whether they could lead to some new types of treatment. That's it. The rest is a game of Get Trump.
Also, of course, lobotomies probably sounded crazy the first time someone suggested them. And as it turns out, they were. For everything that sounds crazy and works, there are a lot of things that sound crazy and prove to be crazy.
We already have enough on our hands with the pandemic, so let’s try to avoid getting more people in the ER.
Many medical interventions are dangerous by nature - doesn’t and shouldn’t stop people discussing new possibilities for investigation, which is what happened here.
Why would we expect this to be anything more than more of the same? I know in HN we are supposed to give each other the benefit of the doubt, but we're well beyond benefit of the doubt here - you're asking us to check our critical thinking skills at the door and to ignore past actions - from the very recent past!
- President brings scientist on stage to talk about new findings that will help combat COVID-19. Why? Because it's important to show people that progress is being made and we're not in a hopeless situation.
- President follows up with the scientist with questions about possible therapies that could be developed. He uses words like 'would it be possible to', 'could we somehow', 'and 'it would be interesting to check that.'
To me that's just a natural reading, given the context. Your reading appears to be:
- President brings scientists on stage to talk about findings
- President recommends that people inject themselves with Dettol (motive unclear)
The problem is that's a ridiculously uncharitable interpretation. I mean, is that what you actually believe the president was thinking?
The (hydroxy)chloroquine is example is also a non-issue. Trump correctly pointed out that this was a low-cost, long circulated drug with well understood risks, and that even if we don't yet know for sure if it works, if patients are dying from the virus, it makes sense for doctors to try it. I'm glad he shone a spotlight on it.
Yes. If not outright recommending it, bringing it up as a somewhat viable possibility. Poison control hotlines have been fielding hundreds of calls asking if it is safe to ingest or inject disinfectant.
>The (hydroxy)chloroquine is example is also a non-issue. Trump correctly pointed out that this was a low-cost, long circulated drug with well understood risks, and that even if we don't yet know for sure if it works, if patients are dying from the virus, it makes sense for doctors to try it. I'm glad he shone a spotlight on it.
Those well understood risks include heart failure and blindness. Trump asked "What have you got to lose?" when saying "I think you should take it", and the answer is my sight and my life. There was no solid medical evidence at that time that chloroquine had any impact on coronavirus in vivo, and what we're finding now is that the null hypothesis is still the best supported in that regard, and that it causes an increase in all cause mortality, to the point where several studies have had to stop because the people they were giving hydroxychloroquine people were dying from heart failure, and the best completed study we have showed a nearly 3x increase in all cause mortality among those taking hydroxychloroquine vs. the control.
It was reckless and irresponsible, exactly like this.
>(motive unclear)
The motive is extremely clear. Trump is worried about a wrecked economy ruining his re-election chances. He wants to open the economy back up to improve his chances, so getting people to believe that we have a plethora of solutions to novel coronavirus helps him achieve that goal.
I think you know this already.
No, this is another example of the media taking his ramblings and trying to clean it up and make sense of it. If that had been the ONLY idea he pushed in that press briefing then I might be more willing to believe that but he followed up with injecting disinfectants so I think it's pretty clear he was just spewing a stream of consciousness.
> After he went to the mat for hydroxychloroquine, it's pretty natural for everyone to be skeptical, though.
To be fair I think the jury is still out on hydroxychloroquine. Trump pushed it because he thought it might a miracle drug that would save the economy and his reelection. That's all true but it can also be true that hydroxychloroquine can work for some people (people without heart conditions and when combined with other drugs like zinc and/or azithromycin, we need more GOOD studies: random, double-blind, high number of people, drug administered early not as "last-ditch"). I hope this whole incident is going to shine a light on a number of "academics" like the ones involved in the unforgivable VA hydroxychloroquine "study". Of course we should also blame the press for treating it as fact but I digress.
The treatment in the "good" studies that, let's be real, most people are gunning for because they go against the president's tweet, they administered the drugs to critically ill patients. The original proposed mechanism of action is solid, came from a Dutch paper in reference to SARS, and ideally the treatment is administered sometime before the patient is already dying.
Just look at what's going on on this website! Anything remotely supportive of Trump is automatically voted down. This is a board of learned professionals who have clout and their lack of objectivity is representative of academia and industry at large right now. Let's not pretend you could openly support Trump at almost any major institution right now.
And this isn't about Trump. This is about getting over petty rage and not leaving treatments on the table to stick it to the man.
There are large studies on this ongoing. If they show something, well, fine, that's good. Until then, no-one should be promoting a dangerous drug to members of the public.
People have gotten absolutely desperate to interpret everything he says or does in the absolutely worst way.
Those are appropriate words of hope and inspiration?
I mean Jesus Christ people, this is literally evidence that he is listening to his experts because he clearly rambles like he doesn't know what he's talking about.
Let me repeat that for those of you who will silently downvote: the fact that he's bringing up these treatments upon questioning from reporters, and deferring to experts in real time, is evidence that he's listening to experts, which is exactly what his critics want him to do!
This bias is infuriating. Apparently Trump critics are incapable of seeing shades of grey.
The well conducted studies that show chloroquine as having an affect on novel coronavirus have all be in vitro. The in vivo studies that have been done that showed anecdotal evidence of effect were poorly conducted, including doing things such as excluding people from the results that died from cv19 while taking chloroquine.
Better in vivo studies have showed that hydroxychloroquine on it's own had no impact on whether or not someone needed to go on a ventilator, and resulted in a nearly 3x increase in all cause mortality. Hydroxychloroquine + azithromycin did not show a significant increase in all cause mortality, but also had no statistically significant impact on whether or not the patient would need to go on a ventilator, and overall mortality was similar to the control group.
Other studies have had to halt due to the number of patients dying due to cardiac issues.
If anything, all large studies with proper controls are showing that chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine are ineffective at treating cv19 at best, and deadly in their own right at worst.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/sunlight-destroys-coronavirus-ver...
https://www.scmp.com/video/china/3075171/shanghai-introduces...