Donald Trump Just Killed A Man. Now He Wants To Kill A Million Americans.

It wasn’t in the middle of Fifth Avenue, but yesterday, Donald Trump killed a man. The man’s wife survived, and did not have good things to say about him. Here’s NBC News on the death:

An Arizona man has died after ingesting chloroquine phosphate — believing it would protect him from becoming infected with the coronavirus. The man’s wife also ingested the substance and is under critical care.

The toxic ingredient they consumed was not the medication form of chloroquine, used to treat malaria in humans. Instead, it was an ingredient listed on a parasite treatment for fish.

The man’s wife told NBC News she’d watched televised briefings during which President Trump talked about the potential benefits of chloroquine.

The wife talked further with NBC:

This death and near-death drive home the danger of Trump’s daily “press briefings” which he is now using as a replacement for his political rallies. His touting of chloroquine on Friday has now killed someone in the US. Recall that Nigeria had to put out a warning Friday as well, as NBC in the same article reported that there were at least two known chloroquine poisonings there right after Trump’s presser. (Chloroquine is more widely available in areas where malaria is endemic.)

But the chloroquine story is far from the biggest problem with Trump’s daily gaslighter. It’s hard to believe that we are only at one week since the publishing of the epidemiological model that really seemed to get the attention of even those who felt COVID-19 fears were overblown. Here’s a summary of the US findings of this modeling, as written by University of Minnesota researchers:

To understand how mitigation or suppression would play out, the Imperial College team, led by Neil Ferguson, OBE, ran a model based on three scenarios. In the first, US officials do nothing to mitigate the spread of COVID-19, schools and businesses are kept open, and the virus is allowed to move through the population.

This would result in 81% of the US population, about 264 million people, contracting the disease. Of those, 2.2 million would die, including 4% to 8% of Americans over age 70. More important, by the second week in April, the demand for critical care beds would be 30 times greater than supply.

If mitigation practices are put in place, including a combination of case isolation, home quarantine, and social distancing of those most at risk (over age 70), the peak critical care demand would reduce by 60%, and there would be half the number of deaths. But this scenario still produces an eightfold demand on critical care beds above surge capacity.

In order to suppress the pandemic to an R0 of below 1, a country would need to combine case isolation, social distancing of the entire population, and either household quarantine or school and university closure, the authors found. These measures “are assumed to be in place for a 5-month duration,” they wrote.

So, with no social distancing, this model predicts over 2 million deaths in the US. Even with fairly strong mitigation practices, there are still over a million deaths and we will need more than 8 times the number of ICU beds we have now. Sadly, from what I can tell, we are somewhere around that level of mitigation with perhaps a few states going a bit more stringent. The UK just yesterday went to social distancing of the entire population, a move that Trump has resisted. Note also that even should the US move to full distancing, the model suggests a need to do so for five months. I’ve seen some pushback against this model, but I would argue instead that if anything, it is an underestimate because I fully expect compliance to fall far short of the assumptions in the model. I’ve seen suggestions that lack of compliance with early distancing orders drove much of the rapid outbreak in Italy.

It appears that the World Health Organization agrees that the US is far short of the level of distancing needed to quash the outbreak here. From Reuters:

The World Health Organization said on Tuesday it was seeing a “very large acceleration” in coronavirus infections in the United States which had the potential of becoming the new epicentre. Asked whether the United States could become the new epicentre, WHO spokeswoman Margaret Harris told reporters: “We are now seeing a very large acceleration in cases in the U.S. So it does have that potential.”

I can only imagine Trump’s presser on the day we become “number one” for the virus.

So even though there was a push for distancing as the Imperial College model was released, we’re already hearing that Trump has had enough. To be fair, Trump and his team were only talking about a 15 day process from the start, but any fool can see that we are still moving in the wrong direction in terms of new cases being discovered to even contemplate letting up on social distancing.

David Farenthold suggests one reason Trump wants to ease restrictions in the Washington Post:

President Trump’s private business has shut down six of its top seven revenue-producing clubs and hotels because of restrictions meant to slow the spread of the novel coronavirus, potentially depriving Trump’s company of millions of dollars in revenue.

Those closures come as Trump is considering easing restrictions on movement sooner than federal public health experts recommend, in the name of reducing the virus’s economic damage.

In a tweet late Sunday, Trump said the measures could be lifted as soon as March 30. “WE CANNOT LET THE CURE BE WORSE THAN THE PROBLEM ITSELF,” he wrote on Twitter.

Heaven forbid that Trump should lose a few dollars to save some lives. Sadly, though, Trump isn’t the only one spouting the bullshit. In fact, it’s pretty clear that Trump’s tweet about the cure being worse than the problem came right after he heard that phrase on Fox News. And to soften the territory for easing distancing, Fox yesterday had the Lieutenant Governor of Texas on to suggest that old grandparents like me need to be prepared to sacrifice our lives so that the economy can get going again. Of course, that’s complete bullshit, as once distancing is reduced anywhere, the effects will be spread over a huge area and across age groups. Anyway, here it is:

So that’s where we find ourselves today. We are perched at a spot where WHO is convinced that the US will be the epicenter of the outbreak within a few days. Instead of moving ahead with the full nationwide lockdown that will be needed actually flatten the curve, Fox News is helping Donald Trump to prepare the public for losing grandma and grandpa so that Trump properties can generate income again and Trump can hold his ego-stoking rallies. If distancing is reduced in a week, as Trump is wanting, the death toll in the US will reach catastrophic levels somewhere between the 1 and 2 million mark Imperial College calculated.

What is likely to interrupt Trump’s desire here, though, is the rate at which New York hospitals are filling. It sounds like they will be overwhelmed as soon as this weekend, so I’d like to think that there will be too much pressure to increase rather than decrease distancing once that reality strikes.

With Trump, though, there are no guarantees and reality often gets left in the dust.

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85 replies
    • timbo says:

      Agreed. The lower estimate is if we actually do something to slow it down. At its peak a whole lot of people seeking emergency medical procedures are going to die. That’s the real lie that’s in place here. In a normal flu season, we don’t stretch our medical infrastructure too much. In this sort of pandemic, with something that is much more deadly, we’re going to have real problems. We can get it down to lower numbers only if we take extreme measures.

  1. XRacerX says:

    “I think I can speak from a lot of experience, because it’s been out there for 20 years, so it’s not a drug that you have a huge amount of danger with. It’s not like a brand new drug that’s just been created that may have an unbelievable, monumental effect, like kill you.”

    “I sure as hell think we ought to give it a try. I mean there’s been some interesting things happened — and some good, very good things. Let’s see what happens, we have nothing to lose. You know the expression, What the hell do you have to lose?”

  2. Francine Fein says:

    As always — follow the money. This sure illustrates why our presidents should not have business interests to cause conflicts.

  3. Lex says:

    Hydroxychloroquine (Plaquinil) is used a lot in the US, but the dangers of its use are still being mitigated. My wife is on it (autoimmune disease) and cannot take more than 300mg/day without the really nasty side effects, like going blind. It’s very bioavalable so it’s also very easy to take too much. A 200 lb person isn’t supposed to take more than 450 mg (5mg/kg of body weight). The touted study is based on doses higher than that, and I’ve read the study. It’s not a good study.

    • DeAnne says:

      I take Plaquenil, and it is a surprisingly well tolerated drug within the parameters for which it is prescribed. (That said, there are some potentially really dangerous drug interactions, and liver damage, etc.) Retina detachment is a potential side effect, but generally only after taking it for five or more years, at the upper end of the dosage range, and even then, it’s a 2% chance. Thus; it is not uncommon to take a “drug break” after X period of time, where X is usually determined by your monthly blood tests. (Or a couple years ago when the price soared to $600 a month.)

      For example, since President Brainworms declared these two drugs to be the “cure” for covid19, and apparently a few doctors have completely decimated stocks of the drug writing prescriptions for hundreds of tablets to themselves, and it’s no longer available for refills, my doctor and I have decided that now seems like a good time for a drug holiday. Hooray?

  4. Pete T says:

    Someone remind Trump he is an old grandparent – older than Jim or me in fact.

    I’ve used chloroquine phosphate before to manage a very ugly outbreak of parasites in a salt water fish tank. The precautions/warnings there for the fish and especially the human(s) just handling it were quite to the point. Dangerous. Hydroxychloroquine is less toxic to humans, but of course Trump has NO BUSINESS even talking about such things – obviously.

  5. ernesto1581 says:

    A Modest Proposal, indeed, Dan Patrick.
    (thanx & a tip o’ the hat to Jon Swift of Dublin, Ireland.)

    Aktion-T4 was another fine program for economic development.

    • Bill Byrd says:

      Oberst-Gruppenführer John Smith’s son Thomas (from The Man in the High Castle) was a victim of this program.

      [Welcome back to emptywheel. Please use the same username each time you comment so that community members get to know you. This is your second user name; you’ve been here previously under “Callender.” Thanks. /~Rayne]

  6. Rugger9 says:

    bmaz, could the wife and other heirs sue Trump for practicing medicine without a license or fraudulent downplaying of medication dangers for clearly off-label use? I am pretty sure it goes nowhere, but there is a reason the medication ads have all of those disclaimers and Trump barreled ahead even when Dr. Fauci tried to stop him. That I would think makes it a little more different because of the repetition points toward intent. We also have the cease and desist letters issued to Bakker and others for the other quack remedies like silver solution.

  7. The Old Redneck says:

    This is the end stage of capitalism. Markets don’t exist to serve people; people exist to serve markets. And that means people should be willing to sacrifice anything, including their lives, to prevent market disruption.

  8. Peterr says:

    Alongside the modeling about the future path of the virus, there are studies involving past pandemics which are highly instructive.

    In the May 1, 2007 edition of the Papers of the National Academic of Sciences, Richard Hatchett, Carter Mecher, and Marc Lipsitch published a study of the 1918 flu epidemic entitled “Public Health Interventions and Epidemic Intensity During the 1918 Influenza Pandemic.” They studied “nonpharmaceutical interventions” [NPIs] — i.e., social distancing, school closings, business closings, etc. — and their effectiveness on slowing the spread of illness in 1918. St. Louis and Philadelphia play a large part in the study (which also included various other cities), in part because they offered two very different approaches. St. Louis was vigorous in engaging various NPIs, while Philly resisted employing them. Laying the spread of disease in these two cities next to each other in graph form match the now ubiquitous graph of what it means to “flatten the curve.”

    It’s a great paper, and generally quite readable for a lay audience (save for some mathematical discussions that you could skip past).

    One line that jumped out to me, given Trump’s evident desire to open things up again, was this: “Finally, and this is perhaps the most important observation [about second waves of illness], no city in our analysis experienced a second wave while its main battery of NPIs was in place. Second waves occurred only after the relaxation of interventions.” In a story in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch about this epidemic, they note “The quarantine was temporarily lifted Nov. 18 but reinstated when the flu roared back in December. By Dec. 10 the flu peaked in the city with 60 deaths in one day. After illnesses declined sharply, the quarantine was lifted just after Christmas.”

    But I’m sure things will be just fine in April if Trump gets his wish and everyone reopens all their businesses.

    Or, you know, not.

    • Kick the darkess says:

      Thanks for the link. A sobering read, maddeningly really. 1918 vs 2020. A century give or take. Advances in our understanding of RNA viral biology and epidemiology-huge. Viruses were just basically infectious agents that could pass through Chamberland filters in 1918. Now we have RT PCR, spatio-temporal mapping of hot spot infection dynamics (within limitations of testing)-all that. But actual tools for limiting the burst-about the same as 1918-NPIs. So, 2020, in the absence of any meaningful federal response states do their own thing. “Who could have known?” Anybody with a fucking clue knew. And so somebody gets to do a retrospective paper in a couple of years about how different states responded and the difference it made just like Philly v St. Louis from fall of 1918. Shit. At least this virus mostly comes for the old and not the young.

      • Rayne says:

        “At least this virus mostly comes for the old and not the young.”

        Please be careful repeating this. We are seeing different demographics affected on a country-by-country basis. France last week said half their critically-ill patients were under 50. A child in Los Angeles area and 36-year-old Brooklyn principal died overnight, a 38-year-old police dispatcher in Detroit the day before that — all examples of case fatalities under 50.

          • Rayne says:

            Given our desperate need to break the contagion, I’m worried about the age of confirmed cases and hospitalizations.


            The deaths will eventually reveal the distribution but mortality isn’t a function of age alone. It’s the ability of the health care system to provide adequate intensive care.

            Can’t really even compare the issue of resource availability for hospitalization and intensive care for COVID-19 patients to the 1918 flu, mortality rate of which we’ve discussed here before.

            We don’t know how much of the age of the victims had more to do with how they were treated and how much more normal it was to lose children before childhood vaccinations were widespread.

            • Kick the darkess says:

              Thanks for the comments. Since this post has kind of run its course will just sort of go. Hopefully won’t deflect anything. I’ve been checking out the NY data coming out of Drew Armstrong’s twitter feed. Updated pretty regularly. It is stunning to be able to drill in and zoom out in what is close to real time. And then to walk outside to a beautiful day, quiet, sans contrails. The profile of cases in NY is dynamic, which of course isn’t surprising (although male/female weighting may hold up?). In addition to the points you raise, another thing is that the virus is under selection, in part, for maximum burst from available hosts. There is an ability, within the bounds of its stripped down genome, to evolve towards this end. Host physiological vigor, innate immunity, distance and persistence are it’s main obstacles. The original thing that jumped the shark in China will be different from the ones reaching maximum velocity in NY, Washington, etc. It will be interesting, in a clinical and academic sense, to reconstruct it once all is said and done. But for now, Peterr’s point that history teaches us the key things we need to know is crucial. It’s about how we respond to the virus, not how it responds to us. It may be too late for some places. US will hit 100K cases tomorrow, a million in another week unless we somehow flatten out. Along those lines, I saw Bloomberg reporting that FEMA is bidding against states for PPE, after the Feds told states to find their own. Christ, what is there to say? In the twitter-verse I see comments hoping Trump, or his family, comes down with this, or speculating that he already has. Twitter’s a select group, no doubt, but one senses this rising anger. Have we finally reached the point where Trump becomes a prisoner of his own media projection? I’ve been trying to reflect on why I too feel so much anger toward this guy. Procrastination really, but ended up on this depressing tangent reading about the downfall of Mussolini. The virus doesn’t care? Of course not. But history doesn’t care either. The survivors just write it down from their point of view.

  9. punaise says:

    (with apologies to Mr. Cash):

    When I was just a baby my mama told me, “Son
    Always be a good boy, don’t ever play with puns”
    But T shot a man in vitro just to watch him buy
    When I hear that asshole blowing, I hang my head and cry

  10. Peterr says:

    The toxic ingredient they consumed was not the medication form of chloroquine, used to treat malaria in humans. Instead, it was an ingredient listed on a parasite treatment for fish.

    Has the Right Wing seized on this as a reason to do away with all those pesky regulations about product labels? “If there wasn’t a rule requiring that ingredient to appear on the label, he never would have taken it and wouldn’t have died. Let his gravestone read ‘Killed by the FDA and EPA'”

  11. Nehoa says:

    It would be nice if LG Patrick would lead by example. Visit confirmed patients without any protective gear to let them know that he thinks it will all work out OK. When he gets sick, he (and his family) agree to be the lowest priority for care and treatment. “If I die, I die. It’s all good!”

    • P J Evans says:

      Maybe Melania, Ivanka, and the other younger Trmps can visit hospitals to show us how much they care.

  12. Slinger says:

    Wow. What a moron this guy was. That’s like drinking isopropyl alchohol because it’s alcohol. (Especially if it’s in fish tank cleaner( Maybe the skull and crossbones is not just for kids, but dumbass adults too ? putting this on Trump is just as retarded. You have to be stupid to blame Trump for this, or have serious Trump derangement syndrome. This article delegitimizes this website greatly. A complete troll website ?

    • P J Evans says:

      They kept hearing that it would work – from the president, on all the channels. I suggest you think about it.

    • Jim White says:

      There is a whiff of troll here, but it’s not from the post. As PJ notes, and as the surviving wife said, Trump said, on live TV during a crisis where the country is looking for leadership, that chloroquine is safe and is essentially a cure.

      Yes, it takes a moron to listen to Trump and believe that he is presenting useful health advice.

      It takes an even bigger moron, though, to defend anything that Trump has done in the past three months and then to come onto a site based on science, evidence and truth and spew the nonsense you’re spewing.

      If you are incapable of any higher intelligence than you have shown in the grand total of two comments you’ve made here, I will routinely start deleting your trash to save time for those who wish to participate in a thoughtful exchange.

      • Slinger says:

        You’re assuming as most liberals do that you have the monopoly on science. I actually have a science background. There are prominent doctors in the fight against the Covid-19 supporting hydroxychloroquine as at least a therapy. A French doctor is adamant that he went 40 for 40 in treating infected patients. That is better than anecdotal. There are severe cases that have been turned around. The above drug is not chloroquine phosphate (fish tank cleaner). Even Dr. Anthony Fauci didn’t anticipate a debacle of that sort.
        That’s not a long paragraph that I’m posting/ It seems a lame excuse “save time” to delete my posts. But have at it. It’s your site that you delegitimize, and will just prove my point by showing you lack intellectual courage to engage opposing opinions.

        • P J Evans says:

          [citation needed]
          Also, people who actually take the stuff for their rheumatoid say it’s something that’s very very touchy to use – the lethal dose is not much more than the useful dose. And they’re having trouble getting it because of people like you and Trmp pushing it for UNAPPROVED AND UNTESTED uses.

          • Slinger says:

            Years ago, I used hydroxychloroquine for a month. They told me a heavy dose. I had suspected residual symptoms of Lyme disease/ Rheumatoid arthritis, and some suspicion of Lupus (which was the greatest concern). Turned out Lupus was ruled out due to the medication having no effect. I ended up rehabbing fully through other means. But the thing I remember was a month of hydroxychloroquine had virtually no noticable effect or side effect.

        • Jim White says:

          Gosh. An interesting column by Karen Masterson, author of “The Malaria Project” just showed up in the Washington Post.
          Turns out chloroquine is nothing but trouble, even against malaria:

          In the 1950s and 1960s, over the strong objections of public health experts at the Rockefeller Foundation (that era’s equivalent of today’s Gates Foundation), federal authorities pressed chloroquine into duty in a worldwide malaria eradication campaign. Millions of people in poor countries were given low doses of the drug to sanitize their blood of the parasites that cause malaria. But these masses refused to conform. Too often, they stopped taking the drug before the required time because of the side effects, which even in low doses included headaches, itchy skin and ringing in the ears — plus serious heart-related complications when taken with other medicines. Malarial parasites quickly developed resistance, and the drug was taken out of circulation. The decades-long effort failed. It was a classic trick played on a world too prone to magic-bullet thinking.

          As for the French study? Here’s her quote of Fauci about it:

          The director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Anthony S. Fauci, warned that these studies were small, ad hoc and anecdotal, not randomized and double blind (necessary to avoid biased results) — which means researchers have no reliable evidence that the treatment works.

          Oh, and if the Arizona couple looked up whether chloroquine phosphate is used in a medical setting as well as hydroxychloroquine, it turns out that it has indeed been used in China, on COVID-19. The problem is that this stuff has horrible side effects, including death, and holds out virtually no hope of actually leading to people achieving anything like a full recovery.

          Having Trump hype it has only made the drug nearly impossible to obtain for those who use it, with some success, on lupus and arthritis.

          • P J Evans says:

            States are restricting prescriptions, because doctors were prescribing it for themselves and their families, with no actual need – hoarding it.

        • Rayne says:

          Provide the citation for the French study to back up your point. Don’t expect this community to simply take your word for it, or to accept that your claim to a science background means you’re actually in medicine/virology/microbiology/public health or some other relevant field.

          I’d like to know if the study complied with the Helsinki principles in particular.

          And if you’re going to bash contributors and moderators, you’re going to find yourself in auto-moderation since a general rule of thumb for this site’s comment threads is and always has been Don’t Be A Dick. Need more specifics? Here you go.

        • vvv says:

          So, just a guess: you are not a “liberal”, and you assume we all are, and further believe that being one per your ass-umption is a bad thing?

          What color is your fave hat?

    • RobertJ says:

      People often have an amazing capacity for ignoring or misunderstanding warnings.

      When I was young, I recall that people would put Vicks VapoRub in their noses and/or eat it.

  13. Chuffy says:

    After binge-watching Narcos over the last week, it dawned on me that DJT’s “businesses” are all supposed to be laundering money for Russian oligarchs, and I imagine that they don’t care about COVID-19 slowing that down. I have no proof of this, of course, but imagine how big his problems get when he continues to rake in millions while all of his properties are allegedly shut down for business.

    Maybe it’s not so much that he’s losing money, it’s that he has no cover right now.

    Just my active imagination getting the better of me. I’m sure he’s nothing but legit…

    • Rayne says:

      That was my thought about Doral, which WaPo’s David Fahrentold said brought in more than other Trump courses combined at $75 million a year.

      That’s a metric fuckton of golf — but it’s probably not just golf fees or membership dues as I’ve pondered before.

      Convenient, though, that Doral is the Trump course closest to the Miami International Airport and Sunny Isles, FL, home to ‘Little Moscow‘.

      • errant aesthete says:

        Rayne,

        Take your speculation on the Doral (pondered before) along with the Sun Sentinel’s profile late last year on the tacky but profitable Trump Royale of Sunny Isles Beach, Fl. (‘Little Moscow’), add the Reuter’s, Miami Herald’s and Daily Beast’s reports, and give some thought to Chuffy’s active Narcos-fueled imagination along with Trump’s sudden manic urge to ignite the economy by Easter and tell me this is a coincidence.

        • Rayne says:

          You know what the next question should be? Did Trump mean shutdowns should end by Easter or Eastern Orthodox Easter?

          Heh.

          • P J Evans says:

            Interesting question. [checks calendar] That’s the 19th. Maybe we should go for the first of Ramadan, which is a little later in the month.

    • Bri2k says:

      I like this theory and it’s interesting that it’s the polar opposite of the other explanation that Trump keeps everything afloat on a shoestring and the house of cards can’t weather a cash-crunch.

      • P J Evans says:

        Both can be true – his hotels and golf courses aren’t getting as much business, so he’s more dependent on the money-laundering aspect – and that requires that he be seen as running a reliable operation, one that won’t go belly-up at any moment.

  14. Corey says:

    I can’t believe I’m going to say this…

    This isn’t Trump’s fault. He was talking specifically about hydroxychloroquine. The form those two idiots took was Chloroquine Phosphate.

      • Tom says:

        Trump knows his words can have harmful consequences. That’s why he went out of his way to praise Chinese-Americans at his press briefing on Monday and no longer–at least as far as I know–refers to “the Chinese virus”.

    • P J Evans says:

      You must have missed how he talked about chloroquine. He was pushing both, with no knowledge or understanding of either, *based on a story run by Fox* which has no evidence backing it up.

    • timbo says:

      You’re right. No one believes your saying it. Just like no one should have believed Trump. Get it yet?

    • Vicks says:

      You left out the part where he “specifically said” it was a cure for a virus that is scaring the crap out of people in this country.
      Trump attracts all sorts of ”followers” and he lies deliberately knowing that they will believe him.
      This person would not be dead if Trump didn’t lie.
      There is no defense when the cause (lying) is 100% preventable.

  15. Randy Sparks says:

    If people are stupid enough to not investigate which is proper to ingest, then they need to be prepared for the consequences.
    I’m sorry that he passed away.

    • Rayne says:

      And yet quite a few people who don’t have health insurance or can’t afford co-pays or medications have used unregulated products intended for their ornamental fish. Drugs like erythromycin, prescribed for infections, are also used for treating bacterial infections in fish.

      If the president — who authoritarian personalities have been groomed for decades to trust implicitly — practices medicine from the podium instead of leaving discussion of drug research to professionals, AND the audience members are those likely to resort to fish medications, I could easily see them taking the chemical the president touted.

      It’s a shame Trump’s base will learn the hard way that their belief in an authority figure should not be absolute.

    • Vicks says:

      Give me a break.
      The only thing we know about this poor soul is that he believed the president of the United States when he lied to our country about a cure for this virus that is killing people.
      Trump wasn’t confused, he wasn’t mistaken, he told a self serving whopper of a lie.
      You want some time to rethink this? You really want to skip over the over the big fella and blame the victim?

    • harpie says:

      Right now, the following, in italics, are direct quotes of the wife on the NBC article, in order:
      https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/man-dies-after-ingesting-chloroquine-attempt-prevent-coronavirus-n1167166
      March 23, 2020, 5:22 PM EDT // Updated March 23, 2020, 5:53 PM EDT // video updated March 24, 2020 1:11 [EDT?]

      The man’s wife told NBC News she’d watched televised briefings during which President Trump talked about the potential benefits of chloroquine.
      1] “I saw it sitting on the back shelf and thought, ‘Hey, isn’t that the stuff they’re talking about on TV?'”
      2] “We were afraid of getting sick,”
      Within 20 minutes, both became extremely ill, at first feeling
      3] “dizzy and hot.”
      4] “I started vomiting,” the woman told NBC News.
      5] “My husband started developing respiratory problems and wanted to hold my hand.”
      She called 911. The emergency responders
      6] “were asking a lot of questions” about what they’d consumed.
      7]“I was having a hard time talking, falling down.”
      8] “Be careful and call your doctor,” she said.
      9] “This is a heartache I’ll never get over.”

      The following are the direct quotes from the article which Vaughn Hiillyard copied in his tweet at 8:56 PM · Mar 23, 2020 [screenshot above]:

      https://twitter.com/VaughnHillyard/status/1242253997005664257
      8:56 PM · Mar 23, 2020

      Woman in ICU:
      1b] “Trump kept saying it was basically pretty much a cure.” NBC:
      “What would be your message to the American public?”
      2b] Woman: “Oh my God. Don’t take anything. Don’t believe anything. Don’t believe anything that the President says & his people…call your doctor.”

      These two quotes are no longer in the article.

      I think 1b] came quite early in the article, probably just after “President Trump talked about the potential benefits of chloroquine.” and just before 1].

      I’m pretty sure 2b] came just before 8].
      [There may also have been more direct quotes where Hillyard places the ellipses, just before “call your doctor”.]

  16. timbo says:

    So the reason Trump hasn’t taken us to war yet is that it would be bad for the Stock Market and bad for his Golf Course fees? Oh joy. It seems like we, the populace, are supposed to take “acceptable losses” so he and his ilk, infesting our Financial and Political Classes, can basically continue to garner more and garner more and more wealth (and property—let’s not forget the foreclosures that are coming here) for themselves at our expense why? Ya know, if I were in the military, I would might be greatly worried that this same logic would be used to send us to war “for the good of the Stock Market”, not to prevent Americans from being needlessly killed per se. And if a few of my family, say children, back home, needed to be sacrificed, “for this greater good” during another pandemic, well, that’s just “business”? Most unsettling.

    • Vicks says:

      Times like this, we need a leader to rally the country.
      I have no idea what to call the guy out there putting all of our resources into rallying the stock market.

  17. joejim says:

    Maybe this is common knowledge but chloroquine phosphate is a fairly frequent drug choice among informed suicides, according to what a psychiatrist friend told me today.

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