Over the past few weeks, the sorts of fringe blogs and conservative “media” that often publish climate denial have been singing the praises of the anti-malarial drug chloroquine, claiming it’s a cure for Covid-19. WUWT, the Daily Wire, and the Daily Signal have all covered chloroquine’s promise, as has James Delingpole several times at Breitbart.
Since clinical trials are only just beginning on the drug, mainstream media has largely shied away from covering this as a near-term cure. While there’s certainly promise in chloroquine and legitimate reason to hope, it would be irresponsible to make people think it’s a safe, miracle, game-changing treatment.
But last week President Trump did exactly that at a press conference. Repeatedly. When Dr. Anthony Fauci corrected him during the briefing, the President instead tweeted a citation of a preliminary piece of work by French virologist Didier Raoult (who the Intercept notes also happens to be a climate change denier, according to French media.)
Not only did that cause a run on the actual drugs, leaving patients with lupus and other diseases without their medication, but it has also led to overdoses when taken by those who don’t need it, and the death of a man who ingested a similarly-named chemical used for cleaning fish tanks in the hopes that it would protect him from coronavirus.
"We saw Trump on TV -- every channel -- & all of his buddies and that this was safe,” the man’s wife, who also ingested the chemical but survived, told the media. “Trump kept saying it was basically pretty much a cure."
In a heartbreaking interview from her hospital bed, she said her message to the American public would be “don’t believe anything that the president says and his people because they don't know what they're talking about. And don't take anything--be so careful and call your doctor. This is a heartache I'll never get over."
This is what makes misinformation so dangerous. These people didn’t get the idea to drink fish tank cleaner on their own. The president didn’t discover this potential cure by himself.
This false promise of protection was based in part on an unreliable paper written by a climate change denier, amplified by an online disinformation ecosystem built to separate people from objective reality as just one part of a decades-old plan to protect industry profits from regulations based on public health and environmental science.
To push climate denial and similar industry-friendly fictions, conservatives have built an online media where the narrative is more important than facts. And this is what happens when a machine built to deceive works as intended.
People die.
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