Media Called Trump ‘Snake-Oil Salesman’ for Touting Drug, Now According to Fauci It's a Game-Changer
The media appears to be more worried about ridiculing President Donald Trump than it is about helping the American people.
Weeks ago, after the president touted the drug remdesivir as possibly being able to help those suffering from the coronavirus, the establishment media attacked him.
But this week, the Food and Drug Administration announced it has authorized the drug for emergency use. The authorization came two days after Dr. Anthony Fauci, who’s generally respected by the media, touted the promising results of the drug, noting that a clinical trial had showed “quite good news.”
The median recovery time for the coronavirus patients who took the drug was 11 days, compared to 15 days for the patients in the placebo group, the National Institutes of Health said in a statement Wednesday.
The results also showed a mortality rate of 8 percent for the patients who took remdesivir as opposed to 11.6 percent for those who took the placebo.
“This will be the standard of care,” Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told reporters at the White House, according to CNBC. “When you know a drug works, you have to let people in the placebo group know so they can take it.”
“What it has proven is a drug can block this virus,” added, noting that he was told the trial’s results showed a “clear-cut positive effect in diminishing time to recover.”
Gilead Sciences, which manufactures the drug, also said the study revealed that around 50 percent of the patients treated with the drug showed improvement.
Then on Friday, Trump announced that the drug had been authorized by the FDA for emergency use in coronavirus patients.
BREAKING: President @realDonaldTrump says the FDA has authorized the use of Remdesivir to treat #Coronavirus patients pic.twitter.com/KmhvNVIZPD
— Team Trump (Text TRUMP to 88022) (@TeamTrump) May 1, 2020
“What I would like to say on behalf of Gilead and the president’s point, we feel a tremendous responsibility,” Gilead CEO Daniel O’Day, who accompanied Trump, Vice President Pence and FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn for the announcement, said, as the U.K. Daily Mail reported.
“We are humbled with this first step for hospitalized patients. We want to make sure nothing gets in the way of these patients getting the medicine. So we made a decision to donate 1.5 million vials of remdesivir. We will be working with the government to determine how best to distribute that within the United States,” O’Day said.
“We will be working very closely to get that to patients, working with FEMA and other parts of the government to make sure that we get that to the patients in need as quickly as possible,” he added.
“There are patients out there that can benefit from this medicine today that are hospitalized. We don’t want any time to waste for that,” he said.
But when Trump touted the drug during a March 19 news briefing, the media was quick to pounce on and ridicule him.
“There are promising therapies produced by Gilead, and that’s remdesivir,” he said. “And that’s a drug used for other purposes that’s been out and has had very good results for other purposes, but it seems to have a very good result, having to do with this virus.”
Trump said it was possible remdesivir “could be a game-changer,” called it a “very powerful” drug and said that drug, among other therapeutics, “could be a tremendous breakthrough.”
The Los Angeles Times was among the media outlets that attacked the president for touting the potential of remdesivir and another drug, hydroxychloroquine.
“In both cases, the president overstated the speed and scope of elements of his administration’s response to the crisis, part of a pattern of overselling that has been a frequent part of his presidency,” the outlet reported.
“Neither of the two drugs Trump mentioned is a proven treatment for COVID-19, the deadly disease caused by the coronavirus, and neither is likely to be publicly available in the near future, as the head of the FDA said in gently walking back part of Trump’s comments, which painted a far rosier picture,” it said.
Meanwhile, the USA Today editorial board said the president was a “snake-oil” salesman for promoting the two drugs.
“If Donald Trump wasn’t quite the quintessential snake-oil salesman at a news briefing this week and on Twitter Saturday — touting preliminary and even unproven medical remedies to the new coronavirus pandemic — he came disturbingly close,” the board wrote.
“Maybe clinical trials of these therapies will show promising results,” it added. “We surely hope so. But for now, Trump risks giving Americans false hope about some pills they might use to ward off the effects of a virus 10 times more lethal, and three times as contagious, as the common flu.”
But it’s beginning to look as though Trump was not, in fact, offering false hope when it came to remdesivir.
Of course, attacking this president is, has been and likely will continue to be more important to the establishment media than helping Americans is.
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