President Trump announced during a press conference that the combination of the malaria drug hydroxychloroquine and antibiotic Azithromycin is a potential treatment for COVID-19.  This is based on both anecdotal evidence of treatment and research from 2005 that showed hydroxychloroquine had an effect on SARS which is also in the family of coronaviruses.

Trump’s specific words were that this combination is a “game-changer.”

With Trump advocating for a hydroxychloroquine-Azithromycin cocktail, it will broaden the latitude doctors have with off-label prescription which generates more data.

Personally, I’ve always supported a “right to try.”  A patient who is dying should have the right to voluntarily take unapproved or off-label drugs if there is a chance that they will work, even if they come with substantial risk, because if that patient is already dying, what else do they have to lose?  I support Trump’s liberal “right to try” approach, especially in the midst of this crisis.

The media and others with TDS immediately sought to destroy both Trump and his supposedly touted cure.

Yesterday a husband and wife in Arizona became a godsend to the media and medical community afflicted with TDS.

From CNN:

An Arizona man is dead and his wife is under critical care after the two took chloroquine phosphate in an apparent attempt to self-medicate for the novel coronavirus, according to hospital system Banner Health.https://t.co/yZOgVumFeu pic.twitter.com/UGRxBRTYH6

— CNN This Morning with Kasie Hunt (@CNNThisMorning) March 24, 2020

From NPR:

An Arizona man is died of a heart attack and his wife was hospitalized after the couple ingested a type of chloroquine, a chemical that has been hailed recently by President Trump as a possible "game changer" in the fight against novel coronavirus. https://t.co/ItBLKqac8B

— NPR (@NPR) March 24, 2020

From Slate:

Arizona Man Dies From Chloroquine Overdose After Listening to Trump Coronavirus Press Conference

From The Hill:

Man dies after taking chloroquine phosphate in effort to prevent coronavirus

From Mother Jones:

Please Take Medical Advice From Your Doctor, Not the President

From Buzzfeed:

A Man Died After Self-Medicating With A Drug Trump Promoted As A Potential Treatment For The Coronavirus

From Forbes:

Man Dead From Taking Chloroquine Product After Trump Touts Drug For Coronavirus

From Business Insider:

‘Trump kept saying it was basically pretty much a cure’: Woman whose husband died after ingesting chloroquine warns the public not to ‘believe anything that the president says’

From a medical doctor and TV personality who describes herself as: “MD, PhD. Expert on #Ebola, #coronavirus, pandemics.”

?BREAKING: A man DIED & his wife is in ICU after they ingested #chloroquine, one of the anti-malarials that @realDonaldTrump touted.

Chloroquine/#hydroxychloroquine have NOT been proven effective against #coronavirus & can cause FATAL heart arrhythmias.https://t.co/kagJQpkzNz

— Dena Grayson, MD, PhD (@DrDenaGrayson) March 23, 2020

To listen to the media and this supposed expert, Trump poisoned this couple with a prescription drug because he’s an idiot.

Amazingly, the best coverage in the United States came from the New York Times.

An Arizona man died and his wife was hospitalized after officials said they ingested a fish tank additive that contained the same active ingredient as an anti-malaria drug, which President Trump has referred to as a coronavirus “game changer" https://t.co/WPZ8fazDYG

— The New York Times (@nytimes) March 24, 2020

This is almost the truth.

If you really want an accurate headline, you have to turn to the British press.

From the Daily Mail:

Man who tried to treat himself with hydroxychloroquine DIES: Couple ate fish tank cleaner thinking it was the malaria drug that Trump is touting as a miracle coronavirus remedy

Holy shit, that is a very different story.

Banner Health, a non-profit hospital system based in Arizona, issued a statement urging the public against the use of inappropriate medications and household products to prevent or treat COVID-19 on Monday.

To emphasize the importance of the warning, officials disclosed a few details of what happened with an unnamed couple that ignored the advice and took their medical care into their own hands.

Note the important part in bold.

It’s believed that they confused the chemical – an additive often used at aquariums to clean fish tanks – with hydroxychloroquine, an antimalaria drug that’s shown promising results in treating COVID-19 patients.

So it’s not even the same ingredient.

The anti-malaria drug Hydroxychloroquine is Hydroxychloroquine sulfate, CAS number 118-42-3.

The chemical they ingested is Chloroquine phosphate, CAS number 50-63-5.

This is how bad TDS is.  It makes an MD PhD to touts herself as a medical expert for the media make stupid chemistry mistakes.

Same active ingredient…

— Dena Grayson, MD, PhD (@DrDenaGrayson) March 23, 2020

No, it’s not.

NBC, despite its headline Man dies after ingesting chloroquine in an attempt to prevent coronavirus provided more details down in the article.

The name “chloroquine” resonated with the man’s wife, who asked that her name not be used to protect the family’s privacy. She’d used it previously to treat her koi fish.

“I saw it sitting on the back shelf and thought, ‘Hey, isn’t that the stuff they’re talking about on TV?'”

The couple — both in their 60s and potentially at higher risk for complications of the virus — decided to mix a small amount of the substance with a liquid and drink it as a way to prevent the coronavirus.

This woman finds an old bottle of stuff used to kill parasites in fish tanks, had a vague idea that it sounded like what Trump said on TV, and mixed an uncontrolled quantity in a glass, and she and her husband drank it with disastrous results.

That’s not Trump’s fault.

These people are fucking morons.

This is literally no different than hearing that hand sanitizer needs to be at least 60% alcohol to kill a virus then chugging Bacardi 151 to cure a sore throat.

But telling the truth is not important when you have a Bad Orange Man to take down.

We need good reporting and all we get is garbage.

He is not happy about this Gringo Company block a life-saving all organic medicine that could save millions… in his imagination:

This Doctor Sirio Quintero is allegedly the “Inventor of the quantum bioelectromedicine protocol with nanotechnology and human reconstitutive undulating genetics in Venezuela and the American continent”, he concludes in his biography. After his studies, Quintero returned to Boconó in the Trujillo state, where he has allegedly solved more than 6,700 cases of diseases and cancers.”

So what is the formula that will save the world?

100 grams of citronella
100 grams of elderberry
5 grams of ginger
5 grams of black pepper
The peels of 2 lemons
Boil in a liter of water then add:
100 ml of honey
The juice of 2 lemons.

Maduro tanted against twitter in one of his televised interventions:

“It’s a crazy thing; I would like to know who is the imbecile, the stupid person who makes the decision on Twitter to block a Venezuelan naturist recipe

And I am done. Nothing I say could explain the level, of stupid and irresponsible that this Bernie Bro is trying to pull. You are better off coming to your own conclusions.

Nobody, OK? I got sick of hearing that little phrase over and over from doomsday pundits.

Guess what? We have numbers now.  I went to the WHO page “Coronavirus disease (COVID-2019) situation reports” and pulled the one for March 10, 2020. 

Italy:  Confirmed cases, 9172. Deaths, 463.  (5.04%)
Spain: Confirmed cases, 1024, Deaths, 28.  (2.73 %)

I then got the report for yesterday and look the US numbers March 23, 2020.

USA: Confirmed cases, 31573 1. Deaths, 402. (1.2%)

We have different health Care systems, different environmental and social components, different lifestyles and cultures, and yet some people are  trying to do the dumb thing and say the factors not included in the equation do not matter, only their wild ass guess do.

I hope we do much better. I realize this thing can go south at any time, but I want to know the real reasons and not just a scaremongering time frame without any scientific base.

I am sure the same story was similarly published in other media, but this is the one I found first.

An Arizona woman says she and her husband thought it was safe to take chloroquine phosphate as a coronavirus treatment because of statements the president has made.
A man has died and his wife was in critical condition after the couple ingested a formulation of chloroquine phosphate, a malaria drug that has been rumored to treat the deadly coronavirus, that is used for cleaning.

Banner Health, an Arizona-based health care provider, announced the death Monday afternoon. A spokeswoman later said the woman was in stable condition and expected to recover.

According to a hospital spokeswoman, the couple, both in their 60s, took the drug as a “preventative measure” to reduce their chances of contracting COVID-19.

Arizona Man Dies After Taking Drug Trump Promoted As Possible Coronavirus Cure

Damn! How that happen? Did their doctor prescribe the medicine without the proper dosage? What happened here?

The woman told NBC she had heard President Donald Trump talk on TV about chloroquine as “pretty much a cure” for coronavirus. “I was in the pantry stacking dog food and I just saw it sitting in the back shelf and thought, ‘Hey, isn’t that the stuff they’re talking about on TV?’ And it was,” she said.

Wait, what? What was that medication doing back there with the dog food in the pantry?

However, a Banner spokeswoman said chloroquine phosphate can be formulated in different ways – as a human medication, but also as an aquarium cleaner. What the couple had was the cleaner, not meant for humans.

The woman said she and her husband mixed a teaspoon of the substance with soda and drank it.

They drank aquarium cleaner! Are you kidding me? God knows what other stuff it has inside and these two idiots thought drinking it was the right thing to do rather than the Darwin Finalist example it ended up being. You know? Clorox has water, but you won’t see me chugging a gallon of the thing if I am thirsty.

Now, the author of this article,  Jessica Swarner knew this. She knew that the couple drank something not meant for human consumption, yet she chose to carefully word the article in a way that would reflect negatively on the President.  Mention it is not a medication but a cleaner do not happen till the fourth paragraph.  “Arizona Man Dies After Taking Drug Trump Promoted” is not even an ‘accurate but not the truth’ title but a blatant lie.  The President never said that people should ingest fish tank cleaner, in fact he has not even said anything about people taking the medicine but only that he feels hopeful it will help cure the victims of the Wuhan virus.

Fish tank cleaners are used to remove the scum that occur in aquariums. I wonder if there is a version for newspapers because we sure as hell it is needed.

Buddy Robert G posted this in Facebook and it seems to be an appropriate comment:

Well, ain’t that nice?  It is crap like this that makes any Floridian develop a nice strain of contempt and repulse for anybody with a NY accent.

As of this hour (8:09 pm) Florida has 1,227 confirmed cases (half of those in Miami-Dade and Broward counties) and a total of 18 deaths. For a state that has a huge population falls within the parameters of dying from Wuhan virus and a lot of them living in assisted living facilities, only 19 deaths is momentous.  yes, I know that number will not hold and we will see more of our elderly dying, but what we don’t need is a combination of the stupidly irresponsible to ad to the danger.

What in God possessed New Yorkers that might be infected, to hop in a flying cylinder that uses recirculated air so all passengers shares a wee bit of Wuhan Virusauce, and then come here to share even more Wuhan Virusauce with the locals just because you did not want to stay quarantined in your city.

And of course, you have nothing in your second home, rental, Time Share or Airbnb, so you need to go to the stores and buy the items you already had in New York but didn’t bring and while shopping, once again  sharing Wuhan Virusauce with fellow shoppers.

But I disagree with De Santis. Do not quarantine them for 14 days and release them but do the lockdown and ship their asses back to NY.

From the New York Post:

‘We should blow up the bridges’ — coronavirus leads to class warfare in Hamptons

Yes, absolutely.  I really don’t need to know more than that, but I am curious.

It’s all-out class warfare in the Hamptons.

Don’t tease me.  It’s not “all-out class warfare” until there is a body count.

The year-round residents, the locals who serve and clean and landscape for the super-rich in the summertime — and put up with all manner of entitlement and terrible behavior in exchange for good money — are silent no more.

“There’s not a vegetable to be found in this town right now,” says one resident of Springs, a working-class pocket of East Hampton. “It’s these elitist people who think they don’t have to follow the rules.”

The elite never follow the rules.  That is the surest sign you’ve made it as an elite. Once you can own your own rape island or have despots funnel hundreds of millions of dollars into your money laundering scheme of a foundation you know you’ve made it.

Every aspect of life, most crucially medical care, is under strain from the sudden influx of rich Manhattanites panic-fleeing, bringing along their disdain and disregard for the little people — and in some cases, knowingly bringing coronavirus.

The Springs resident says her friend, a nurse out here, reported that a wealthy Manhattan woman who tested positive called tiny Southampton Hospital to say she was on her way and needed treatment.

The woman was told to stay in Manhattan.

Instead, she allegedly got on public transportation, telling no one of her condition. Then she showed up at Southampton Hospital, demanding admittance.

That’s just evil.  Seriously.  How many people did that woman possibly infect because she decided she was rich enough to bypass the NYC quarantine and bring her disease to her summer resort home hospital.

“We’re at the end of Long Island, the tip, and waves of people are bringing this s–t,” says lifelong Montauker James Katsipis. “We should blow up the bridges. Don’t let them in.”

I highly recommend whistling while you do it.

“That small act reflects a lot of what we deal with in the summer,” he says. “Selfish. Disrespectful. Absolutely horrifying.”

“I’ve seen breathtaking acts of selfishness,” says lifelong East Hamptonite Jason LaGarenne, 42. “I saw one guy walk out [of a grocery store] with a cart full of carrots. Just carrots. Another cart was full of bottles of water and orange anti-microbial dish soap. If you’re a ridiculous person in general, I guess your ridiculousness is amplified by something like this.”

This comes as no shock to me.  The super-rich showing up in what they think of as exclusively their vacation spots and buying up everything depriving the locals of necessities.

The offseason, October through June, is sparsely populated and can be very isolating. During that time, local grocers only stock food and supplies for a severely reduced population. There is no FreshDirect, no Whole Foods, no door-to-door food deliver

I’ve never been to the Hamptons but this is something I’m familiar with this in Florida.  There are areas that are know for their spring break or tourist spots that during the offseason are practically ghost towns.

My grandparents used to own a vacation home in one of these spots on the Gulf Coast.  When we visited them during the offseason the community was very different.  It was just retirees and a city rolled up the sidewalks at 8:00.

If the Hampton locals were not planning for a tourist rush, they are only going to have on hand what they need for their small community.  Having people escape New York City and descend on them as a refuge without warning will drain them of their resources.

The South Hampton hospital is pretty small too.  It’s only a 125-bed hospital with eight ICU beds.  It’s not built to support a huge population year-round, especially during a crisis.

“The biggest problem — what really gets me going — is that they think because they’re all the way out [here], they’re safe,” says Katsipis. “But some of those people are sick, and they’re going out to bars and acting like they’re on vacation. What do these city people think — we have some imaginary, magical bubble?”

I’ve mentioned this before.  I love the book World War Z, and there is one chapter in which a security guard for a celebrity talks about the celebrities who hunkered down with private security in guarded mansions and partied while the zombie apocalypse was occurring.  It was fun until the zombies breached the walls of the compounds and the celebrities were all eaten.

I’m getting a strong whiff of that.

Then there is the famous story The Masque of the Red Death by Edgar Allan Poe.  The nobles have a party during the plague but the plague shows up and kills them all anyway.

I’m getting a strong whiff of that too.

Still, every local who spoke to The Post said their community has one thing going for it that the rich don’t have: They really look out for each other.

The super-rich believe that they are entitled to break quarantine and consume everything the locals have because of their money.

This is why the royalty always wanted to disarm their serfs.  They know they can only heap this casual abuse and disregard for the lives of those under them for so long before there is a peasant revolt.

One seems like it’s coming in the Hamptons.