There's as much reason to believe in this stuff as there was to believe in Laetrile, and as much to believe in either as to believe you can cure cancer by eating dog shit.
But Fauci is OK with letting desperate people do that? Really?
And he thinks money and time ought to be spent testing its safety and efficacy?
Fauci Destroys Fox & Friends’ Efforts To Play Coronavirus Doctors And Promote Unproven Drug
Fox & Friends tried – and failed miserably – to push Dr. Anthony Fauci into endorsing the experimental coronavirus treatment Dear Leader Donald Trump is promoting, hydroxychloroquine, along with the suggestion that the lack of its widespread use is to blame (i.e. not Trump) for the growing number of deaths in the U.S.
Early in Fauci’s appearance on Fox & Friends yesterday, a graphic was posted saying a Sermo survey of 6,227 doctors found that 37% found hydroxychloroquine to be “the most effective” COVID-19 treatment.
Cohost Steve Doocy added that “only about 23%” of U.S. doctors prescribe it, “far less than in other countries.”
He played a clip of (discredited, except on Fox) Dr. Mehmet Oz, who wanted the Friends to ask Fauci about “the Chinese study that we discussed yesterday from Wuhan that reflected statistically significant improvement in recovery from fever, from cough, and in pneumonia as well.”
After gently debunking the preceding bullshit, Fauci said:
We still need to do the kinds of studies that definitively prove whether any intervention, not just this one, any intervention, is truly safe and effective.
But when you don’t have that information, it’s understandable - and I grant that it’s understandable - why people may want to take something anyway, even with the slightest hint of it being effective, and I have no problem with that.
People need him to be a voice of sanity and a moral hero, but he's not all that satisfactory at either job.
Responsible medical professionals and genuine scientists were not this soft on stupidity, soft on exploitation of ignorance, or soft on criminal snake-oil peddling when the FDA would not allow the use of Laetrile to treat cancer anywhere in the US, though criminals and indulgent fools demanded both that we be sympathetic toward idiots who wanted to throw away their life savings on quack scams and that the law be relaxed so these boobs could be fleeced right here in the US.
After a lot of wasted time, money, and scientific effort repeatedly proving Laetrile was worthless and even dangerous, legitimate medical researchers finally urged that no more time and resources - time and resources that could be usefully spent on other things - be wasted repeatedly proving bullshit was bullshit.
And still in many state legislatures elements of the Republican Party, in large part a coalition of fraudsters, their mostly libertarian ideological enablers, and their willing victims, were able for a good while to get their way, to the shame of other Americans.
This is the Duce, himself, using a Coronavirus briefing just yesterday to urge surrender to what so totally deserves to be called fake news.
And there is absolutely no telling, in this case as in so many others, whether the revolting public enemy in the White House is truly and sincerely as stupid as he seems or whether it's just his propaganda technique to pretend so.
In a rambling, hostile White House briefing on Saturday, Trump urged Americans worried about the virus to try hydroxychloroquine, a drug used to treat malaria, arthritis and lupus that has not been extensively tested for other conditions.
“Take it. What do you have to lose?” the president said, suggesting that he might do so himself after asking “my doctors”.
And even in this same story the journos are over-selling Fauci's shamefully weak and timid response as a full-throated and vigorous rejection of bullshit.
Yet this is really all he had to say.
“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.”
And the story immediately quotes somebody else, a doctor not in any way dependent on Trump, doing a better job rejecting this tripe.
But all the same the dismaying truth is that nobody has yet denounced the quack remedy as not only bullshit but harmful bullshit.
And far from urging with Fauci and these other cowards that its value be tested, responsible professionals ought to be insisting that legitimate researchers don't waste time and resources testing crap on nothing better than the say-so of irresponsible Republican propagandists and profoundly dishonest, criminally immoral politicians like the gang boss in the White House.
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