Over the past few weeks, US President Donald Trump has been urging Americans to take hydroxychloroquine, which he touts as a “miracle cure” for the coronavirus known as COVID-19. Intrigued by the persistence of Trump’s claim, The Guardian has sought to uncover the origin of his apparent fixation on this exotic molecule currently used for the treatment of malaria and lupus.
The principal sources of Trump’s obsession appear to be Didier Raoult, a long-haired, bearded doctor in France; Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla; Oracle CEO Larry Ellison; and Fox News. Only one of those sources appears to be serious and well-informed since he’s a doctor. But Raoult has an unfortunate habit of expressing his nuanced description of the possible merits of experimental treatment in French, a language that Trump appears not yet to have mastered, which may explain the misunderstanding.
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Closer
to home, Trump has the option of taking counsel from his own chief adviser, Dr.
Anthony Fauci, who is widely considered to be well-schooled in the epidemiology
of infectious diseases. Despite an Italian name, this doctor speaks English.
Trump sometimes appears to listen to him and even defer to his judgment, though
there are other times when he finds it prudent to exile the doctor from the
podium, presumably to avoid contradiction or confusing his audience with mixed
messages.
The Guardian comments on what appears to be a disagreement of interpretation: “Fauci, the country’s top infectious disease doctor, has repeatedly warned that there is no conclusive evidence to support using the drug Trump continues to recommend.” On March 24, when he was asked whether it should be considered a treatment for COVID-19, Fauci offered this laconic appreciation: “The answer is no.”
Here
is today’s 3D definition:
Conclusive
evidence:
Solid empirical proof, a determination that some politically naive scientists insist on having before making statements to the public, for fear of creating confusion. In contrast, politicians and hypermedia heroes tend to prefer, in terms of interest and utility, either inconclusive evidence or simply wishful thinking (alternative reality).
Contextual
Note
For
politicians, conclusive evidence has a nasty habit of creating embarrassment at
the same time that it limits their margin of maneuver. For the media,
conclusive evidence has the added drawback of reducing the level of suspense.
Even when virtually an entire scientific community admits that conclusive evidence is present — think of climate change — there’s the risk for the media that it may kill the life of a story that people want to continue hearing and worrying about day after day, week after week. Aware of the risk that their audience may tune out, all respectable media outlets engage in the admirable effort of finding contrary, marginal voices that can, at appropriate moments, instill the kind of doubt that creates the illusion of an open debate and the need for further investigation.
In
the case of chloroquine, it would appear not only that conclusive evidence is
lacking, but also that there are serious risks for some patients. Moreover,
using the existing supply to treat the novel coronavirus poses the problem of
its availability for the diseases for which it is currently being prescribed.
The only presumably positive evidence to go on has been anecdotal and,
therefore, unreliable.
There
is, however, evidence that President Trump has an obsessive need to promise
quick, likely unreliable resolutions to every known problem. For example, he
has consistently promoted a wall to keep “rapists” and “drug dealers” on the
other side of the southern border with Mexico. He regularly devises new
sanctions to correct the behavior of foreign leaders and restore democracy, even
in nations where it already exists. He implements tariffs to bring back exiled
manufacturing. He deregulates industries to restore their belief in the freedom
of free markets and allow them to maximize profits otherwise constrained by
irrelevant issues of safety, environmental sustainability and public health.
And now he threatens to withhold money from the World Health Organization (WHO) to punish the UN agency because, according to Trump, it “missed the call.” This simple remedy will presumably teach the WHO not to miss the call next time.
The New York Times informs us that there may be even a more compelling reason for Trump to recommend the drug. “Mr. Trump himself has a small personal financial interest in Sanofi, the French drugmaker that makes Plaquenil, the brand-name version of hydroxychloroquine,” The Times reports.
Trump can also claim that his commitment to the drug is bipartisan since a Democratic politician from Michigan affirms that, tipped off by Trump, she has been cured by chloroquine. The new national political rockstar on the Democratic side, Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York, has also begun promoting the drug (at the same time as he is helpfully cutting billions of dollars from the state’s Medicare budget). The Times doesn’t appear to know whether Cuomo also has a stake in Sanofi. The newspaper of record nevertheless cites a number of Trump’s “associates” who “have financial interests in the issue.”
One
doctor at the Brooklyn Hospital Center, Joshua Rosenberg, finds Trump’s
insistence comprehensible: “He’s the president of the United States. He has to
project hope. And when you are in a situation without hope, things go very
badly.” He justifies it “even if there isn’t a lot of science behind it.” It
might have occurred to Rosenberg, as it did to another doctor at St. Barnabas
Hospital in the Bronx who was also cited by The Times, that when a political leader
projects “false hope” things may go not just “very badly” but disastrously
wrong.
Historical
Note
Some
may be tempted to attribute the quality of the debate today to the rise of
postmodernism in the academic world in the final decades of the 20th century.
Like hydroxychloroquine, postmodernism was first developed in France by
thinkers such as Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. After several years of
incubation, it was imported by professors in the humanities (especially English
departments) into the US academic establishment. They called it “theory,” a
term that sounded more scientific and philosophical than the traditional
“literary criticism.”
Those of us in France who were familiar with the French version of that group of thinkers’ contribution to the social sciences noticed a serious mutation to this particular strain of thought as it went viral on US campuses. Like any living organism, it adapted to the very different conditions of a foreign environment, in this case, the highly-competitive intellectual academic milieu of American universities.
The
work of Foucault and Derrida focused on discourse. One of the conclusions that American
interpreters of their work reached turned around the analysis of the influence
exercised by real or imaginary power structures on public and literary
discourse. The French thinkers’ historical investigations had revealed that
many of the things people widely accepted as true owed their status as truth to
the interests of powerful groups who profited when ordinary people uncritically
accepted such ideas as truth. If truth depends on self-interested discourse,
the truth value of any proposition can be analyzed according to the interests
of specific groups who use the belief in such truths to maintain their power
over the rest of the population.
The
French thinkers assumed that culture could be better understood by building
into their account the historical reality of the shared notions and assumptions
that both ordinary people and skilled writers and orators use, often
reflexively, in their discourse. The American academics, born and bred in a
culture of individualistic competition, saw this as the means of attributing
blame to certain categories of people. It provided them with the key to determining,
in any historical situation including the present, who was competitively taking
advantage of whom, in the interest of establishing and defending power for
their group. The next logical step would be to cast opprobrium on those groups,
feeding the fires of identity politics.
This
transformation of the French thinkers’ idea of discourse as a reflection of
power relationships merged smoothly with an element that was already present in
US culture: the idea that in a democracy, everyone has a right to an opinion
and therefore, in some sense, all opinions have an equal claim to validity.
In the debate over whether to
consider hydroxychloroquine as an effective medicine for treating COVID-19,
Trump’s trade adviser, Peter Navarro stepped into the debate to defend his
commander-in-chief and contradict Anthony Fauci. He did so on the following
postmodern grounds: “Doctors disagree about things all the time. My
qualifications in terms of looking at the science is that I’m a social
scientist. I have a Ph.D. And I understand how to read statistical studies,
whether it’s in medicine, the law, economics or whatever.”
In the postmodern world that Peter Navarro
belongs to as a social scientist, there is no need for conclusive proof. Strong
opinion will do, especially if it’s backed up by a PhD. Lacking that academic culture, Trump himself frames the
question in simpler terms: “So what do I know? I’m not a doctor. But I have
common sense.” After all, who needs “theory” when they already have common
sense?
*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news.]
The
views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily
reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.
