“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-reveal-team-trumps-chloroquine-master-plan

Forget testing, ventilators, and PPE. Donald Trump’s big plan to beat COVID-19 involved distributing millions of doses of an unproven drug. Behind the scenes, senior administration officials pushed hard to bend the rules and back up his boasts.

Saturday, April 4, President Trump stood at the White House podium and escalated his marketing blitz on behalf of hydroxychloroquine, hyping the old malaria drug’s alleged promise in treating COVID-19, as well as his administration’s success in acquiring huge amounts of it.

“We have millions and millions of doses of it - 29 million to be exact,” he said, as the official tally of U.S. COVID-19 cases topped 260,000 and governors across the country pleaded for federal support to acquire tests, ventilators, and protective gear for health care workers.

That evening, according to emails obtained by Vanity Fair, Trump’s political appointees would ramp up the pressure on career health officials to make good on the president’s extravagant promises . . . (cont)"

"(cont.) . . . despite clear warnings from federal clinicians about the risks and unproven benefits of chloroquine-based treatments for COVID-19.

Vanity Fair has assembled this account based on documents and interviews provided by multiple federal officials with knowledge of internal Trump administration proceedings.

The president had been touting hydroxychloroquine for weeks, sparking worldwide shortages of the drug and prompting negotiations with Indian prime minister Narendra Modi to lift export restrictions on its active ingredients.

But on March 24, the federal government’s top interagency working group of clinicians and scientists privately threw cold water on his claims, according to a federal official with knowledge of the working group’s deliberations.

In an internal consensus statement, a medical countermeasures group within HHS recommended chloroquine-based COVID-19 treatments should be studied only in controlled, hospital-based clinical trials . . . (cont.)

(cont.) . . . because their safety and efficacy was “not supported by data from reliable clinical trials or from non-human primates” and carried “potential risks.”

And yet, just hours after that April 4 press conference, White House officials pushed ahead with a massive behind-the-scenes pressure campaign on the government’s top health officials to deliver huge amounts of chloroquine drugs to just about anyone who wanted them.

That night, Brett Giroir, the assistant secretary for health in the Department of Health and Human Services, sent an email with the subject line “Hydroxychloroquine”. The email read:

[Giroir email]: WH call. Really want to flood Ny and NJ with treatment courses. Hospitals have it. Sick out patients don’t. And can’t get. So go through distribution channels as we discussed. If we have 29 million perhaps send a few million ASAP? WH wants follow up in AM.

[Giroir email cont]:

We can get a lot more of this. Right Bob? Millions per week?

Giroir's email went to a group including FEMA administrator Pete Gaynor, HHS assistant secretary for preparedness and response Robert Kadlec, and Navy Rear Admiral John Polowczyk, who leads a supply-chain task force at FEMA.

Read the whole article. Vanity Fair has the receipts.

The punchline, if you can call it a punchline, is the FDA has now warned against use of hydroxycholorquine for covid-19 and clinical tests with actual patients found the primary outcome of using it in treat is: death. https://twitter.com/LauraWalkerKC/status/1253705491190034433