@FoxNews Stars Trumpeted #Trumps hydroxychloroquine Malaria Drug, Until They Didn't

[riversedge]

Fox News Stars Trumpeted a Malaria Drug, Until They Didn’t

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/22/business/media/virus-fox-news-hydroxychloroquine.html

Laura Ingraham called hydroxychloroquine “a game changer.” But after a month of coverage, she stopped discussing the drug on the air.




By Michael M. Grynbaum April 22, 2020

For a month’s stretch, the Fox News star Laura Ingraham relentlessly promoted the malaria drug hydroxychloroquine to her nearly four million nightly viewers.

The drug was “a game changer” in the fight against the coronavirus, the conservative anchor declared. She booked recovered patients to describe their “miracle turnaround” — “like Lazarus, up from the grave,” as Ms. Ingraham put it. Anyone who questioned the drug’s efficacy, she said, was “in total denial.”

“I love everybody, love the medical profession,” the host said on April 3, after listing off public health experts who questioned the cure. “But they want a double-blind controlled study on whether the sky is blue.”

But as of last Wednesday, Ms. Ingraham was no longer talking about hydroxychloroquine, and she didn’t bring it up on her show for a week.


Her fellow Fox News prime-time stars Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity also cut back on referring to the drug. In fact, since April 13, hydroxychloroquine has been mentioned about a dozen times on Fox News, compared with more than 100 times in the four previous weeks, according to a review of network transcripts.

The shift came as President Trump has dialed back his public zeal for the treatment — and as studies and health experts have increasingly cast doubt on the efficacy of the drug in treating coronavirus.


On Tuesday, a study of 368 Veterans Affairs patients showed that the use of hydroxychloroquine was associated with an increased risk of death. Mr. Trump’s own medical team, including Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s leading expert on infectious diseases, has urged caution about hydroxychloroquine, noting the drug’s potential adverse effect on patients with heart troubles.


Ms. Ingraham declined to be interviewed for this article..................................



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Laura Ingraham, an advocate of treating the coronavirus with hydroxychloroquine, had stopped mentioning it on her Fox News show by the middle of last week.Credit...Alex Wong/Getty Images

[thucythucy]

1. Worried about lawsuits, perhaps?

Or the ramifications of dispensing medical advice without a license?

[riversedge]

2. Ingraham said she would address it on Wed. show............

I have not seen a write up on it.



https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/media/fox-news-hosts-go-mum-on-hydroxychloroquine-the-covid-19-drug-they-spent-weeks-promoting/2020/04/22/eeaf90c2-84ac-11ea-ae26-989cfce1c7c7_story.html

...................Carlson, Hannity and Ingraham didn’t mention the new research on their programs on Tuesday. The topic has faded from their commentary, replaced by rhetoric about China’s culpability for the pandemic and advocacy for reopening the country, again seemingly as part of a feedback loop with Trump’s own comments.

Ingraham, who met with Trump in early April to urge him to push the drug, hasn’t discussed hydroxychloroquine since April 15. She tweeted on Wednesday that she would address the new research about it on Wednesday. (She also tweeted, in reference to another pandemic-related topic, that “We made big decisions based on faulty data, bad models.”)