New report says positive studies on hydroxychloroquine as effective coronavirus treatment were impugned or ignored in efforts to discredit Trump

by Karen Faulkner, Worthy News Correspondent

(Worthy News) – In an article published Tuesday, the WND news outlet reports that the COVID-19 death rate in the US is higher than in many other countries because opponents of President Trump have presented hydroxychloroquine, a malaria drug publicly endorsed by the president in March, as harmful and ineffective in treating coronavirus. WND bases its report on a white paper published by the Economic Standard (ES) called: “Hydroxychloroquine and the Burden of Proof: An Urgent Call to Depoliticize Medicine in the COVID-19 Pandemic.”

The WND report begins by quoting the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons executive director Dr. Jane Orient, who has reportedly asked why the COVID-19 death rate is “about 75 percent lower in many countries” than it is in the US. According to WND, the answer to this question is found in the ES white paper which “shows a gap between countries that treat COVID-19 early or prophylactically with hydroxychloroquine and those that, like the U.S., discourage or prohibit its use.”

Writing the overview to the report, ES Editor-in-Chief Erik Sass explains: “The COVID-19 pandemic struck America nine months before a presidential election, turning basic medical activities like testing and treatment into partisan battlegrounds.” Noting that the ES report was written in close collaboration with physicians and infectious disease experts from the US and around the world, Sass asserts: “No subject has been more distorted than hydroxychloroquine (HCQ), a safe, versatile medicine that has treated hundreds of millions of people for numerous diseases for seven decades.”

Sass continues: “political opponents defied longstanding scientific and medical consensus to portray HCQ as harmful and Trump as a mortal danger to public health. Flawed and even falsified studies were published and promoted by media outlets eager to discredit Trump, while positive studies were impugned or ignored,” Sass writes. “This campaign persists even as evidence of HCQ’s benefit against COVID-19 grows – including scores of observational controlled trials showing therapeutic effect when administered early in disease progression.”

According to the paper, hydroxychloroquine “has met the appropriate burden of proof and urges members of the U.S. news media, the public health community, and regulatory agencies to stop politicizing the use of this medicine.”

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