RUTHFULLY YOURS

The urgent search for a COVID-19 cure means that the usual scientific approach to testing medicines – big studies with careful control groups – is not an option. We can’t wait that long. Instead, trial and error, along with an accretion of anecdotal data, is the best we’ve got.

This method has yielded one significant possibility for treating COVID-19: Chloroquine or hydroxychloroquine (which are similar malaria drugs), along with azithromycin and zinc. (For ease, I’ll refer here to the whole treatment as “chloroquine.”)

Funnily enough, though, the Democrats are incredibly hostile to the chloroquine. One has to wonder if they’re hoping, not for the best, but for the worst.

Fairly early in the COVID-19 pandemic, China said that it had seen some good outcomes with chloroquine. Others began noting the same thing. In early March, UPI reported that South Korean experts recommended anti-malarial drugs to treat coronavirus.

Chloroquine also got a boost when Prof. Didier Raoult, a famous virologist, published a study showing that, of eighty in-patients treated with chloroquine, seventy-eight recovered fully, one died, and one remained ill. Raoult felt so strongly about chloroquine’s benefits that he concluded it would be unethical to have a control group that did not receive the medicine. On Wednesday, the New York Times reported that another study from China pointed to chloroquine as a possible cure.

One day after we learned about Didier’s study, “[a]n international poll of more than 6,000 doctors released Thursday found that the antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine was the most highly rated treatment for the novel coronavirus.” On the same day, infectious disease expert Stephen Smith predicted that chloroquine is the “beginning of the end” for COVID-19.

Meanwhile, just one day after its own reporting on the most recent Chinese study, the Times was already trying to undermine chloroquine. Thus, it published an article casting delicately phrased aspersions at Dr. Vladimir Zelenko, a board-certified family practitioner, who claims that he’s successfully used chloroquine hundreds of times on patients in Kiryas Joel, a New York community outside of Manhattan that is home to around 35,000 Hasidic Jews. Zelenko admittedly hasn’t been able to test the hundreds of people who reported to him with COVID-19 symptoms, but he’s offered that treating his symptomatic patients with chloroquine, azithromycin, and zinc sulfate resulted in every patient being cured, without any worsening.

Incidentally, it’s not unreasonable to believe that Zelenko has seen a lot of patients with COVID-19. For both cultural and religious reasons, ultra-orthodox Jews have been more vulnerable to the disease.

Zelenko made a video addressed to President Trump and gained viral fame, especially amongst conservatives. And that is where the leftists’ willingness to accept his information comes to a screeching halt. Look at the way the Times describes the response to Zelenko:

Dr. Zelenko’s treatment arrived at a useful moment for Mr. Trump and his media supporters, who have at times appeared more interested in discussing miracle cures than testing delays or ventilator shortages.

Sean Hannity, the Fox News host, quickly promoted Dr. Zelenko’s claims on his TV and radio shows. Mark Meadows, the incoming White House chief of staff, called Dr. Zelenko to ask about his treatment plan. And Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, praised him in a podcast interview this week for “thinking of solutions, just like the president.”

Few people have been as hopeful about hydroxychloroquine as Mr. Trump, who has enthusiastically promoted it for weeks as “very effective” and possibly “the biggest game changer in the history of medicine” — even as health experts have cautioned that more research and testing are needed.

The message to Times’ readers is clear: Do not take this treatment seriously. It’s all about propping up President Trump.

It’s true, of course, that Zelenko’s data is limited and that his sudden fame has elevated chloroquine further than his small sampling of patients would indicate, mainly because he hasn’t been able to test them for the virus. And of course, there’s the usual grumbling about side effects from a known drug regimen.

The left’s determination to cast shade on chloroquine, though, seems to go beyond an effort not to get people’s hopes up. As the references to “Trump and his media supporters” indicates, leftists seem genuinely concerned that a quick cure, following on the heels of Trump’s increased visibility and popularity, will help Trump in November.

However, what may also be going on is a wish, either overt or subliminal, that there won’t be a quick cure for the virus and that the economy crashes. This would be the realization of the Cloward-Piven strategy that Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, two hard leftists, called for in 1966. The strategy envisioned overloading the welfare system to cause the economy to crash. Once crashed, it could be rebuilt along socialist lines.

Would leftists really want tens of thousands of people to die and the economy to collapse just to realize socialism? Maybe. I’ll let you draw your own conclusions after you listen to this question and answer session with California Governor Gavin Newsom. While Newsom explicitly praises capitalism (as he should because the Getty family gave him his start in business), he entertains the idea of using the pandemic to rebuild society along Progressive lines: