We need to know what Trump and Giuliani got out of boosting hydroxychloroquine

I’m going to paint you two scenarios. In Scenario One, the president of the United States is an incurious and poorly informed person who holds many delusional opinions and is widely described by the people who work with him as an idiot, dope, or moron. He doesn’t have the interest or stamina to read a two-page report, and intelligence briefers have to come up with innovative visual aids in a desperate attempt to get him to absorb vital information. While he has no clue what is going on half the time, he’s always looking for an angle to make a buck, and he’s proven quite adept at duping the public out of their money.

In Scenario Two, none of the above is true and Donald Trump actually is a voracious reader who likes to keep up on the latest in epidemiology by perusing European medical journals, including the one published by the French International Study of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy. It is there that Trump learns of a (horribly bad) study based on only 20 patients claiming that the malaria drug hydroxychloroquine and the antibiotic azithromycin could be taken in combination to reduce the amount of COVID-19 virus in the nose and throat. Armed with this knowledge, he immediately comes to the independent conclusion that this treatment regimen has “a real chance to be one of the biggest game changers in the history of medicine.” He then says he is taking hydroxychloroquine himself and begins promoting it to anyone who will listen, not for any hidden financial benefit but strictly as an altruistic way to improve public health and save lives.

Which of these two scenarios seems more likely to be true? Continue reading.