The Lethal Wages of Trump Derangement Madness. By Victor Davis Hanson.
For about five years, anything candidate, president-elect, and President Trump said or did, the media, the Left, and progressive popular culture opposed in Pavlovian fashion.
Anything that Trump touched was ridiculed or discredited — regardless of evidence, data, or cogency. The merits of a Trump policy, a Trump assessment, a Trump initiative were irrelevant — given the primordial hatred of the Left of all things Trump: the president, the person, the family.
Under the reductionist malady of Trump Derangement Syndrome, facts and logic did not matter. Instead, anything not said or done in opposition to Trump empowered the supposed existential Trump threat. Ironically, some of the most deductive and reductionist Trump haters were supposedly professionals, the highly educated, and the self-proclaimed devotees of the Enlightenment. And yet in their uncontrolled aversion and detestation, they suspended all the rules of empiricism, logic, and rationality — and people died as a result. …
Covid and HCQ:
Doctors in poor countries such as India were attracted to one, hydroxychloroquine (HCQ), an old, cheap, anti-malarial drug, generally recognized as safe and also known for its efficacy in treating inflammatory diseases such as lupus.
When stories surfaced that both American and European doctors had independently claimed clear effectiveness of the drug in treating some COVID-19 patients, Trump in reaction tweeted that it couldn’t hurt to take the drug, either as a medicine or a prophylactic. Rumors swirled that he had taken the drug himself.
Furor ensued. Outrage followed. And soon the time-tried hydroxychloroquine was considered an existential evil on par with Trump himself.
If prior to Trump, the drug had been hailed by the United Nations as an essential medicine, especially in poor countries for its dirt-cheap cost, effectiveness, and general safety, suddenly it was now considered little more than a toxic witch’s brew. Fauci’s legions demonized the drug and soon it sometimes proved illegal for doctors to prescribe hydroxychloroquine for off-label usages.
“Double-blind” studies supposedly “proved” that the drug was useless, even though there was not comprehensive research conducted at different dosages and at different stages of the COVID-19 disease. Additional reports from India that some doctors there felt that the sudden widespread use of hydroxychloroquine and the anti-parasitical drug Ivermectin were responsible for decreases in COVID-19 lethality were likewise mocked.
Now we read this week that a new study conducted at the Saint Barnabas Medical Center, New Jersey, found that when the dosages of hydroxychloroquine were calibrated and adjusted by patient weight, and fortified by the antibiotic azithromycin, there was a more than 100 percent increase in survival rates among COVID-19 patients — without any correlation to heart arrhythmias.
More specifically in this context, maverick frontline doctor and infectious disease specialist Dr. Stephen Smith, of the nonprofit Smith Center for Infectious Diseases and Urban Health, recently argued that perhaps 100,000 lives might have been saved had the medical guild not demonized the drug and utterly dismissed it. Note that we are learning that once-heralded, far more expensive and difficult to administer drugs, such as plasma therapy and Remdesivir, offered little efficacy in treating COVID-19. Why were the latter drugs considered legitimate experimental protocols in desperate times to treat the seemingly untreatable disease, but not hydroxychloroquine?
The answer may be that Trump advocated the latter and not the former.
The left lied, people died.
But the media pretended it didn’t happen, so it was swept under the rug along with Stalin, Mao, Che, etc, etc.
Also, Trump probably would have won the election by even more if the likely origin of covid in a Chinese bioweapons lab had been acknowledged by the media at the time.
