Sometimes we see in others what we see in ourselves. Or we think other people are motivated the same way we are motivated. Trump and the White House assumed the Democrats, myself included, would not want hydroxychloroquine to work because we feared that the president would get credit for it. And if COVID was resolved, it would be good for the president. However absurd, I had heard this from enough Trump supporters to know that they were sincere. They believed Democrats would sabotage hydroxychloroquine for political purposes. How sick is that? People are dying, billions of dollars are being spent, how could anyone put politics above a cure? Maybe the White House could.
I had been working very hard to keep our COVID efforts in New York nonpartisan, and I had even gone on Sean Hannity’s show to reach out to all New Yorkers, because if you’re not on Fox News, you’re missing the best platform to talk to conservatives in the state. To be clear, Hannity was perfectly cordial with me. Because I had no national agenda, I wasn’t a threat.
However, hydroxychloroquine became the line in the sand for Fox; Hannity talked about it all the time. Dr. Oz was talking about it. But there was an undercurrent of doctors saying, “We’re not sure it works, and we think it may be causing harm.” And if you were against hydroxychloroquine or even unsure about it, you were the enemy.
The White House was growing increasingly eager for the test results. State government had nothing to do with the timing of the tests, because it was all done by hospitals, with the data to go to the FDA for review, but that didn’t stop them from pressing to get the test results done faster.
Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, called me. It was highly unusual for him to call me. When we did meet, he had a general air of negativity around him. When I picked up the phone, Meadows said that they wanted the results from the tests on hydroxychloroquine. I told him, as I told the president, that the tests were being done by the hospitals and when they were complete they would be sent to the FDA. I didn’t know how long they took, but no one had any interest in causing undue delay. Meadows then communicated to me that the federal government was about to send out funding for hospitals and strongly implied that if the tests weren’t completed, New York wouldn’t receive any funding.
Now, I am a New Yorker, I am not a shrinking violet, and I am accustomed to dealing with all sorts of personalities. I have no problem dealing with tough guys—whether they are genuine tough guys, or really scared guys trying to act tough, or guys who think they need to act tough to impress me. I don’t mind exaggeration or expletives, but I draw the line at extortion. It is incredible to me that the chief of staff to the president of the United States would ever link the production of drug tests to federal government health-care funding. Government Ethics 101 tells you that’s a no-no. Meadows might not have had any federal executive experience, but he was a congressman and as such should’ve known that quid pro quos are no-bueno.
I wondered if Meadows wanted the results because he was assuming they would be positive or if he already knew what they were. I assumed that the results must be positive or he would not have been as aggressive in wanting their release. I told Meadows that the state Department of Health would transfer the test results to the FDA as soon as they received them and that to threaten me with not funding the hospitals in my state was not a good tactic to take and would not prove productive for him.
Then I spoke to Dr. Howard Zucker and asked him when the hospitals would finish the tests. Dr. Zucker said he didn’t know, that he had nothing to do with the tests, but that as soon as they were ready, the hospitals would send the results to the FDA. I asked Dr. Zucker to let the FDA know that as soon as the results were ready, they would receive them.
At last, the results came in, and they were negative. Hydroxychloroquine is not effective in treating COVID, and the results actually raised possible health risks. At the same time, a number of doctors were publicly speaking out against hydroxychloroquine and the risks of using it. Remarkably, in June the FDA itself would conclude that hydroxychloroquine was of no beneficial effect and was in fact dangerous. This is just after President Trump announced that he was personally taking hydroxychloroquine as a preventative for COVID infection.
I have two theories about what motivated the president and his minions. First, it was about money. Maybe someone had stock in a drug company related to hydroxychloroquine, or there was some financial scheme by which someone would financially benefit. The second theory is in some ways more troubling. The president was desperate to end this nightmare of coronavirus that was disrupting his reelection by disturbing the economy, and he desperately wanted to believe that there was a simple solution: There was one pill to make it all go away. Literally.
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