Why Did Fox News’s Laura Ingraham Relentlessly Push Hydroxychloroquine?

This week, yet another health official found himself sidelined by the White House. This time, it was the man in charge of leading the government's development of a coronavirus vaccine: Rick Bright, director of the Department of Health and Human Services’ Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority. He said he'd been pressured to direct resources toward the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine—one of several “potentially dangerous drugs promoted by those with political connections”—and that he was ousted for insisting that the federal government invest in "safe and scientifically vetted solutions, and not in drugs, vaccines and other technologies that lack scientific merit."

Hydroxychloroquine has become a much-hyped miracle cure among some on the right, including the president himself, Fox News hosts Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson, and trade adviser Peter Navarro, who has been warring with Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, over Fauci's repeatedly stating that there is no clinical evidence backing it as a COVID-19 cure. But perhaps no one has gone to bat for unapproved, off-label use of the anti-malarial drug more than host Laura Ingraham, who relentlessly promoted hydroxychloroquine and laid siege to medical professionals urging caution from the perch of her evening show, The Ingraham Angle, with its millions of viewers.

Ingraham was on the hydroxychloroquine beat early. The buzz about the drug started in Silicon Valley and took off on March 13 when blockchain investor James Todaro tweeted, "There is growing evidence of Chloroquine as a highly effective treatment for COVID-19," along with a link to a Google doc, in which he and others wrote to make their case. Just three days later, on March 16, Ingraham hosted one of Todaro's coauthors, lawyer Gregory Rigano. And four days after that, on March 20, Ingraham was saying on her show that "the FDA needs to hop onto this pronto" and that she would "happily volunteer" for a trial study, presumably aware that would require her to first contract the virus. That same day, she tweeted that "many hospitals" were using the drug and seeing "very promising results," citing a doctor at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York. Twitter later deleted the tweet, since it violated the site's rules against spreading false information about coronavirus—the source Ingraham used didn't work at Lenox Hill.

Not only did Ingraham continue to promote the drug, she also started assailing public health experts. On April 3, Ingraham said, "I love everybody, love the medical profession. But they want a double-blind controlled study on whether the sky is blue"—implying that using a powerful drug for a new virus sans replicable studies was as obviously logical as the observed laws of nature. The week of April 8, Harvard Medical School professor William Haseltine appeared on Fox News's The Daily Briefing and referred to hydroxychloroquine as a "quack cure" and warned that it "will have a very mild effect on changing the course of the disease, if it has any effect at all." Ingraham responded on her own show, calling Haseltine's comments "completely disgusting" and accusing him and anyone else questioning the drug of wanting to undermine the president.

She also advocated that CDC director Robert Redfield be fired for dismissing the drug as a cure for the novel coronavirus. By this time, patients with arthritis and lupus, two conditions that actually require treatment with hydroxychloroquine, were struggling to find the drug, due to shortages resulting from its being hyped as a coronavirus cure. And a man in Arizona had died after ingesting a form of chloroquine meant to clean fish tanks.

Instead of offering her viewers a brief correction about the lack of evidence, Ingraham has frequently brought what she calls her "medicine cabinet" onto the show, Washington-based cardiologist Ramin Oskoui and New Jersey–based infectious-disease specialist Stephen Smith. The trio's promotion of hydroxychloroquine went beyond cable-news chatter. Remarkably, the three managed to secure a face-to-face meeting with Trump at the White House on April 3 to talk up hydroxychloroquine, and Trump reportedly forced Food and Drug Administration (FDA) officials to attend with him. In an April 2 appearance on The Ingraham Angle, the night before visiting the White House, Smith touted the amazing impact hydroxychloroquine would have on the outbreak. He declared to a grinning Ingraham, "I think this is the beginning of the end of the pandemic. I’m very serious." As of Friday, there are 870,000 confirmed cases of coronavirus in the U.S. (another 2.7 million worldwide) and a death toll of 50,031.

While the science behind hydroxychloroquine's usage for lupus and arthritis is clear, it's inconclusive so far regarding the coronavirus. But some preliminary results don't seem to be promising. In early April, a study in Brazil was halted because of the heightened risk of cardiac arrest in patients. And the new study out Tuesday, examining 368 VA patients, has put a damper on those glowing predictions. Like most studies so far on the affect of hydroxychloroquine on coronavirus, this new study hasn't been peer-reviewed yet, but it's endorsed by the National Institutes of Health and the University of Virginia. The study's authors claim that when paired with azithromycin, another drug Trump has hyped, hydroxychloroquine had no effect on COVID-19 treatment. When used alone, the drug may have resulted in an increased risk of death.

While The New York Times reports that Donald Trump has a small personal financial interest in Sanofi, the French drugmaker that makes a brand-name version of hydroxychloroquine, Ingraham's investments are unknown. And as more experts pushed back on the drug's promotion as plague cure, both Politico and the conservative-media watchdog Media Matters reported that Trump and conservative media figures suddenly toned down their comments about hydroxychloroquine shortly before that study came out, and on Wednesday The New York Times published an article titled "Fox News Stars Trumpeted a Malaria Drug, Until They Didn’t."

Ingraham didn't take that kindly—on Wednesday night, she lambasted the Times and The Washington Post, saying they "reflexively joined the pig pile" with "the jackals at Media Matters." She continued, "Now, I'm not a doctor, I don't play one on TV, but renowned French virologist Dr. Didier Raoult released his own study on hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin just a few weeks ago. It demonstrated 91 percent effectiveness in more than 1,000 patients with zero side effects. There was one outcome that was not good, but in the patients that recovered, there was zero side effects."

But Ingraham neglected to mention that Raoult's study was deeply flawed; the International Society of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy took the extremely unusual step of warning that it "does not meet the Society’s expected standard." Raoult, who in the past has questioned the validity of both evolution and climate change, did not use any basic study standards—it was not controlled, not randomized, not double-blinded.

Of course, cable-news hosts often plug bogus health studies and junk science for feel-good lifestyle segments (drinking red wine is good for you! sitting on your couch prevents cancer!). But rarely has a pundit attacked the country's leading health experts to promote an unproven cure for a deadly, highly contagious disease—and then refused to backtrack on their previous recommendations to arm their viewers with updated and accurate information. Ingraham's obsession with hydroxychloroquine might be based on similar motivations to Trump's: The outbreak makes the president look bad, and a miracle solution that makes coronavirus vanish would make him look better. Whatever Ingraham's incentives for pushing the unproven drug as a pandemic rages through the U.S., it would seem that her 3.6 million viewers would be better served by the advice of the nation's best health experts—not their excoriation.

Elon Musk, a terribly flawed French study, and Trump’s trade adviser all hyped an antimalarial drug as the coronavirus cure.

Originally Appeared on GQ