Trump’s fake cure for COVID is responsible for 17,000 deaths

Donald Trump began shilling for the use of hydroxychloroquine at the very first of what became his daily White House update on the COVID-19 pandemic. The drug is primarily used as an anti-parasitic, mostly in the treatment of malaria, and there was never any good evidence that it was effective in addressing COVID-19. Hydroxychloroquine can lower the number of infection-fighting white blood cells, making it possibly the worst type of medication for anyone trying to fight off an infection.

However, in the earliest days of the pandemic, Trump declared the drug a “game changer” and began stockpiling millions of pills. Under pressure from Trump and TV host Dr. Oz, the FDA authorized emergency use of hydroxychloroquine as a potential treatment for COVID-19. The drug didn’t work. The U.S. ended up with a mountain of worthless pills. And Trump went right on promoting its use long after the FDA officially warned consumers not to use it.

It’s impossible to know how much Trump’s promise that hydroxychloroquine was an effective treatment caused people to disregard the threat of COVID-19 or how much this opened the door to conspiracy theories about vaccines. But a new study in Biomedicine and Pharmacotherapy puts an estimated number on deaths directly resulting from the use of this drug to treat COVID-19 patients: 16,990.