‘What Do I Know, I’m Not a Doctor’: Trump Touts Unproven Coronavirus Drug at Briefing
President Donald Trump lambasted the governor of Illinois and pushed an unproven drug for coronavirus at the White House press briefing on Sunday.
The daily briefing was not expected to go forward, until Trump announced last minute it would at 6:45 p.m. There was little news in the president’s comments — but there was a bitter shot at Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, who criticized the federal response to Covid-19 earlier Sunday.
“There is a governor, I hear him complaining all the time, Pritzker. He is always complaining,” Trump said. “He’s not able to do what he’s supposed to be able to do as a governor. He has not performed well.”
The president spent the rest of his remarks touting hydroxychloroquine, an antimalarial drug that has shown some promise in helping patients recover from the coronavirus.
“And another thing we have bought a tremendous amount of is hydroxychloroquine,” Trump said. “We have stockpiled 29 million pills of the hydroxychloroquine. 29 million. A lot of drugstores have them, by prescription. And they’re not expensive.”
“What do you have to lose?” the president asked. “What do I know? I’m not a doctor. I’m not a doctor. But I have common sense.”
National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci, a member of the coronavirus task force, has repeatedly emphasized that the antimalaria drug should not be seen as a cure for the coronavirus.
“In terms of science, I don’t think we can definitively say it works,” Fauci told CBS’s Face the Nation. “The data are really just at best suggestive. There have been cases that show there may be an effect and there are others to show there’s no effect.”
According to a new report from Axios, Fauci even had an explosive fight with Trump trade adviser Peter Navarro over the drug. On Saturday, Axios’s Jonathan Swan reported that Fauci called evidence supporting the effectiveness of the drug “anecdotal” when Navarro touted it during a meeting. That comment from Fauci “just set Peter off” one source told Axios, leading to a heated exchange.
Watch above, via MSNBC.
