President Donald Trump is out of office, but the scientific debate of hydroxychloroquine as an early treatment against COVID-19 has not gone away with him.
As Dr. Anthony Fauci used the HCQ debate to disparage the former president in Thursday's White House press briefing, Newsmax TV's Emerald Robinson noted The American Journal of Medicine recently published a review of the use of HCQ as an early treatment.
Robinson tweeted before Fauci's HCQ critique of Trump:
"Remember how people were banned for recommending hydroxychloroquine? Suddenly, it's being recommended in the American Journal of Medicine. What happened this week that made this drug OK with the medical community?"
Unfazed, Fauci used HCQ as a reason to reject the Trump administration's approach to the global coronavirus pandemic that mushroomed under Fauci's lead as the nation's top infectious disease official.
Fauci went so far as saying working with President Joe Biden over Trump was "liberating," telling reporters during the daily press briefing:
"I don't want to be going back over history, but it was very clear that there were things that were said — be it regarding things like hydroxychloroquine and other things like that — that was really uncomfortable because they were not based on scientific fact.
"I can tell you I take no pleasure at all in being in a situation of contradicting the president, so it was really something that you didn't feel that you could actually say something and there wouldn't be any repercussions about it.
"The idea that you can get up here and talk about what you know, what the evidence, what the science is, and know that's it. Let the science speak. It is somewhat of a liberating feeling."
But Fauci might have ignored the scientific research recently published in the AJM.
"HCQ was approved by the US Food and Drug Administration in 1955, has been used by hundreds of millions of people worldwide since then, is sold over the counter in many countries, and has a well-characterized safety profile that should not raise undue alarm," the review read.
Eric Mack ✉
Eric Mack has been a writer and editor at Newsmax since 2016. He is a 1998 Syracuse University journalism graduate and a New York Press Association award-winning writer.
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