President Donald Trump said he had “just finished” taking a two-week course of the antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine, the medication he has vigorously promoted as a preventative or curative treatment for the coronavirus, even as evidence piles up that the drug may cause more harm than good.
“Finished, just finished,” he said in an interview that aired on Sinclair Broadcasting on Sunday. “And by the way, I’m still here.”
The president again defended his decision to take, and talk about, the unproven treatment in the interview, amid Food and Drug Administration warnings against using the drug for COVID-19 outside of hospital settings because of a risk of serious heart problems.Read more…
ON MAY 1, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published a report that outlined how coronavirus spread in the U.S. via European travel to the New York metropolitan area, despite a popular narrative that China was the main conduit for the disease. So why was the U.S. quick to halt flights from China, but slow when it came to Europe?
Experts say that ingrained racism informed policymakers’ and the media’s favorable views toward European countries, and that even when presented with direct evidence to the contrary, those biases impeded important public health measures that would have kept people safe.
“Race and racism disallowed the U.S. from recognizing Europe as a threat,” said Khiara Bridges, an anthropologist and professor of law at University of California, Berkeley. Read more…
Donald Trump on Tuesday appeared to seek to continue a confrontation with a CBS News reporter which led to the president being accused of being racist towards Asian Americans.
Seeming to tweet in response to the incident involving Weijia Jiang on Monday evening, Trump wrote without offering evidence: “Asian Americans are VERY angry at what China has done to our Country, and the World. Chinese Americans are the most angry of all. I don’t blame them!”
At a briefing in the White House Rose Garden, Jiang asked the president why he continues to claim – wrongly, as he did again on Tuesday – that the US is performing better than other countries in terms of testing for coronavirus.
“Why does that matter?” asked the reporter, who was born in China and came to the US at the age of two. “Why is this a global competition when, every day, Americans are still losing their lives?” Read more…
As the novel coronavirus pandemic spreads around the globe, so does xenophobia and racism against ethnic Asians in Western countries, and Trump’s accusation against China, where the outbreak was first reported, fueled the hatred.
A growing number of incidents against Chinese and ethnic Asians as the whole have been reported around the world since the outbreak started, and the number of racist remarks and crimes against Asian communities spiked after Trump publicly referred to COVID-19 as the “Chinese virus” on his Twitter on March 16.Read more…