Oh it's because he's "getting great calls about it" from Fox News personas who are not doctors themselves, and instead fell for bad studies from a questionable French doctor.
If anything the drug magically curing coronavirus would make the entire stock market, and his re-election chances, go up dramatically, so there is no need to look for an insider trading argument when plain old wishful thinking/stupidity explains it all.
What front page carried an accusation of “insider trading” over the HCQ?
It appears to have been a story spread by twitter and facebook posts. https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/apr/09/facebook-p...
Using the “Front page” of a newspaper or reliable news source is much more likely to get real news than social media...
Backing news article https://medicine.yale.edu/yigh/news-article/25085/
If you open the study, you'll see there are open-labeled non-randomized trials he is referencing.
It's been a handful of months since COVID-19 grasped the globe. Too early to take things as gospel. As we are finding out in this thread, these types of studies are open to bias and rife with mistakes or misinterpretations. If we are to take the desired lesson from this thread, it's that data surrounding these medical journals need to be highly scrutinized before we can take them in as evidence.
http://www.ijmr.org.in/preprintarticle.asp?id=285520
https://swarajyamag.com/insta/icmr-study-reveals-four-or-mor...
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.27.20073379v... https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.22.20040758v...
The older HCQ study wrt SARS: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1232869/
Document of a collection of studies (a bit biased - please don't be irritated) https://docs.google.com/document/d/1545C_dJWMIAgqeLEsfo2U8Kq...
So in other words, unproven.
The studies that the right wing news media and Trump were referring to back in March showed a one hundred percent cure rate.
Mainstream media sources in the USA were mainly warning not to obtain HCQ without a prescription (as several people did in various countries and killed themselves/spouse with overdoses). And also that people shouldn’t rashly expose themselves to the virus, believing the president and his political allies that they could be “100%” cured using HCQ. For instance, https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-twitter-deletes-... “Twitter removed [. . .] In the tweet on Friday, Giuliani quoted conservative youth activist Charlie Kirk, who claimed that an unproven anti-malaria drug, hydroxychloroquine "in at least three international tests was found 100% effective in treating the coronavirus," according to screen shots of the message published by Mediate.”
HCQ continued to be used under emergency authorization in hospitals by doctors fighting the coronavirus, because it’s possible it somehow helps although it hasn’t been proven to work.
However, the media attempted to fight the spread of misinformation which claimed a 100% effective treatment was available, which was leading to issuing unneeded prescriptions for HCQ and a shortage for patients who actually needed the drug for other conditions. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/25/us/coronavirus-trump-chlo... “ And the nearly 32,000 prescriptions came from across the spectrum — rheumatologists, cardiologists, dermatologists, psychiatrists and even podiatrists, the data shows.”
Researchers have withdrawn[1] studies that claimed much weaker statements than this.
[1]: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.05.20088757v...
Why do we pretend like we've never met Trump when we talk about him? He's endorsing it because one of his friends mentioned it to him. That doesn't give everybody else an excuse to be as irresponsible as he is. The reason he's listened to is because he's the president of the US, the reason scientists are listened to is because of a perception of high standards and integrity. If scientific institutions play the Trump game, afterwards he'll still be President, but they'll have nothing.
Give me a break. The initial data in an emergency is all we have to go on, and it looked likely that the drug could be helpful. It's still unknown. Same as Vitamin D, which all kinds of people are promoting. If Trump refused to promote it, you'd have people here up in arms that he refused to let people know about it, blaming him for untold deaths if people had simply been informed.
Meanwhile, initial data made it look like lockdowns would save lives, too. The jury is still out on that, too, but it's looking like it didn't do nearly as much as people thought it would.