Long before COVID-19, Trump venture presaged his hydroxychloroquine pitch
The FDA has withdrawn its emergency use approval for hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for the coronavirus. Credit: AP / Rafiq Maqbool
President Donald Trump's hype of hydroxychloroquine as a coronavirus "game changer" finally appears to be fizzling like many of his earlier product promotions. The Food and Drug Administration on Monday withdrew its emergency use approval of the antimalarial drug as a COVID-19 treatment. Now the federal government reportedly finds itself stuck with 66 million stockpiled doses; officials haven't decided what to do with them.
Trump's public musings about ultraviolet light and disinfecting one’s insides also proved to be nonstarters in dealing with the pandemic. Medical matters often seem to produce the strangest of Trump tales — from a doctor's rave about his health in a 2015 letter the then-candidate apparently dictated to a crackpot theory about wind farms causing cancer. Last weekend, the way the president walked, talked and drank water in public raised questions about his motor skills.
One chapter from Trump’s pre-White House career in particular seems to have foreshadowed his hydroxychloroquine hype. It began in 2009 when he lent his brand name to a venture, called the Trump Network, that offered urine tests to determine which of the company’s vitamin products customers should take.
Medical experts apparently saw no scientific basis for the gimmick. Pieter Cohen, a specialist in dietary supplements and an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School, told the Daily Beast in 2016: “This is a scam, it’s a bogus program to make profit for the people who are selling it. It’s fantasy … There is zero evidence that is actually doing what they say it was."
The company ended up drawing Federal Trade Commission complaints and lawsuits. Claims against the "network" included fraud by its sales force and false medical assertions. The company, founded before Trump's stewardship, was bought out in 2012.
Trump was suspected on other occasions of fueling quackery. That was especially the case when he used Twitter to feed a long-debunked conspiracy theory linking vaccines to autism, although the president seems to have backed off on that issue.
On April 9, the president was asked as he left a coronavirus briefing if he had any financial interest in hydroxychloroquine. “No I don’t," he said. "Good question.” Even with clinical trials still ongoing, Trump announced that he took the substance with no ill effects. But Rick Bright, after being demoted from his federal post as a top vaccine official, filed a complaint charging that political leadership pressured him to make chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine available despite concerns about their effectiveness against the coronavirus.
Inside the administration, the drugs were promoted for COVID-19 use by Peter Navarro, a top trade official. Navarro clashed with medically better-qualified Dr. Anthony Fauci, a leading infectious diseases expert and a key member of the White House coronavirus task force.
Outside the administration, the Job Creators Network, an advocacy group founded by Home Depot co-founder Bernie Marcus, helped post an online petition pushing the products.
“There is clear and ever-mounting evidence that the anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine can significantly help patients who contract coronavirus," stated the group's appeal.
Trump University, another of his defunct entities, taught courses in selling real estate. Unsurprisingly, Trump never opened a medical school.
Dan Janison is a member of the Newsday editorial board.
