Larry Elison and Trump Pushing Hydroxychloroquine Health Info Collection App
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
Vanity Fair looks at Trump's plan to battle virus with unproven drug. Vanity Fair contributor Katherine Eban discusses new reporting on the president's plan to beat COVID-19, which involved distributing millions of doses of an unproven drug.
https://www.msnbc.com/morning-joe/watch/vanity-fair-looks-at...
>Q: Hey Katherine, it's Willie Geist. Just want to ask you quickly about where this idea came from to President Trump. He doesn't typically peruse the New England Journal of Medicine I think in his free time looking for treatments to problems. So we know Rudy Giuliani was in his ear pushing this. We know certain Fox News hosts either visited the White House or called him to talk about this as they pushed it on their air. Where did the idea even come from for Donald Trump to raise this?
>A: You know, there's been some reporting around this, you know, a couple of bloggers and online things that sort of filtered up to the president. We also know that Larry Ellison, who is the Oracle founder, was talking about this to him. Ellison offered to donate an app which could track patient symptoms. Patients who were using these experimental drugs. So somehow, and I think it's not exactly clear yet, but will become clear, the hydroxychloroquine idea coalesced with the idea of using this app to monitor symptoms, and that the hydroxychloroquine was going to be pushed out very widely, and I think that is the piece that our story in Vanity Fair really adds to, was the idea for this very wide and largely uncontrolled distribution of this unproven and potentially dangerous drug.
“Really Want to Flood NY and NJ”: Internal Documents Reveal Team Trump’s Chloroquine Master Plan
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/04/internal-documents-r...
>Inside the administration, as the White House cobbled together a plan to make chloroquine drugs widely available to the American public, Trump’s political appointees began exerting tremendous and unwelcome pressure upon career health officials. As part of the plan, Oracle, the technology company co-founded by billionaire Trump fundraiser Larry Ellison, designed and built an app to collect data from physicians and patients tracking the response to various experimental treatments for COVID-19. (A source familiar with Oracle’s app called it “an information collector; it does not recommend therapies or treatment plans.”) [...]
>On the evening of March 23, the FDA’s chief counsel, Stacy Amin, emailed lawyers and other officials within HHS, the National Institutes of Health, and the FDA, urging action. The proposal that she relayed, as she spelled it out, was to have BARDA sponsor what is called an investigational new drug study. An IND permits a new drug in preclinical development to be shipped across state lines to be studied. In this case the IND would have covered an old drug with a potential new use. Amin, who served as a special assistant to President Trump before assuming her current role at the FDA in September 2018, wrote, “The President is announcing this tonight and I believe the WH would like it set up by tomorrow with data to flow into the Oracle platform.” She then asked, “What needs to be done and what requirements do we think can be waived or use enforcement discretion?” [...]
>As health officials navigated a minefield of long-standing regulations that were impeding the White House campaign, the message from the presidential podium was exultant: Trump had zeroed in on a potential cure and had slashed red tape to speed it to patients in need. On April 4, the president declared that the tech giant Oracle had donated a “very sophisticated” web portal to gather real-time data on how patients were responding to the new treatments. [...]