With help from Fox News and Elon Musk, a misleading French study prompted a wave of misinformation that made its way to the president
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This weekend, Donald Trump used his daily White House coronavirus briefings to again urge Americans to take hydroxychloroquine, an anti-malaria drug that has not been shown to be safe or effective against Covid-19.
“What do you have to lose? Take it,” the president said on Saturday as he boasted that the US had amassed 29m doses of the drug. On Sunday, facing questions from the press about his aggressive promotion of an unproven treatment, he argued against waiting for the completion of clinical trials. “In France, they had a very good test,” he said. “But we don’t have time to go and say, ‘Gee, let’s take a couple of years and test it out, and let’s go and test with the test tubes and the laboratories.’”
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