Attorney General William Barr has condemned the media for what he says are partisan attacks on President Donald Trump for touting the malaria drug hydroxychloroquine as a possible weapon against the novel coronavirus.
In an interview on Fox News, Barr told the anchor Laura Ingraham it was “disappointing” to see the media response to Trump who had been “statesmanlike” in working with governors and yet still had to deal with “snarky ‘gotcha’ questions from the White House media pool.”
He said that “the stridency of the partisan attacks on him has gotten higher and higher,” and said the “politicization of decisions like the hydroxychloroquine has been amazing to me.”
“Before the president said anything about it, there was fair and balanced coverage of this very promising drug and the fact that it has such a long track record, that the risks were pretty well known.
“As soon as he said something positive about it, the media has been on a jihad to discredit the drug, It’s quite strange,” Barr said.
On Tuesday, Trump continued his championing of the drug on the same network, telling anchor Sean Hannity, “One thing that we do see is that people are not gonna die from it. So if somebody is in trouble, you take it, I think. I would.”
While not officially approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), around 29 million doses of hydroxychloroquine, which usually treats malaria and lupus, have been added to the federal stockpile.
In a statement on Wednesday, the FDA said that studies were still being carried out to “determine the efficacy in using these drugs to combat COVID-19.”
Current guidance limits the drug’s use to those who are hospitalized, however doctors told NBC that like any therapeutic it was likely to be more effective if taken earlier.
“When you give it to somebody who is already super sick, it’s likely not going to make an impact because the damage is already done,” said Dr. Ken Lyn-Kew, a pulmonologist at National Jewish Health, a hospital in Denver.
In the rest of the interview on The Ingraham Angle, Barr raised his concerns about the length of the shutdown across the U.S. saying, “we will have a weaker health care system if we go into a deep depression.
“So just measure it in lives, the cure cannot be worse than the disease,” he said, in an echo of Trump’s tweet last month that “we cannot let the cure be worse than the problem itself.”
The graphic below, provided by Statista, illustrates the spread of COVID-19 in the U.S.
Spread of COVID-19 in the U.S.
