March 30, 2020

USA: Man Dies From Fish Tank Cleaner. Media Interviews Man's Wife. She Blamed President Trump For Promoting Chloroquine. Turns Out She's A Democrat Who Actually MURDERED HER HUSBAND.

National Review
written by Charles C.W. Cooke
Tuesday March 24, 2020

From NBC News comes one of the most irresponsible pieces of “journalism” I’ve seen in a long while. It revolves around an interview with a 61-year-old woman from Arizona who is currently in the ICU, and who, tragically, just saw her husband die in front of her. In tone, it is cast as a public-service announcement of sorts, aimed at Americans who do not want to end up in her position. “My advice,” the woman explains, is “don’t believe anything that the President says and his people because they don’t know what they’re talking about.”

The promulgation of that narrative — that her predicament is the fault of the president, and that people should stop listening to him and to his “people” — is the purpose of the piece. Here is a representative excerpt:
NBC: Did you see the President’s press conference? Where did you hear about–

Patient: Yeah. Yeah, we saw his press conference. It was on a lot, actually.

NBC: And then did you did you seek out Chloroquine?
Throughout, the woman tells NBC’s Vaughn Hillyard that she hopes to share her “advice” with the public. “Educate the people!” she implores him at one point. And he has. Last night, NBC pushed the story out enthusiastically on its website, on Twitter, and beyond, and it was shared widely by journalists and celebrities who were only too keen to employ it as partisan ammunition.

There is a problem with the story, however: It’s nonsense. Sad as their predicament is, the only “advice” to be gleaned from the couple’s behavior is “don’t be a unimaginable moron.” The headline of NBC’s story is “Arizona man dies after ingesting chloroquine in an attempt to prevent coronavirus.” But this is not correct. He did not “ingest chloroquine,” and neither did his wife. Rather, he ingested chloroquine phosphate, which his wife found in her back pantry the form of fish tank cleaner.

From the interview:
“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.”
It wasn’t.

I’m afraid that this is the stuff of idiocracy — the equivalent of a person seeing a bucket of chlorine next to her swimming pool and drinking it because the letters on the outside are arranged in a similar order to the word “chloroquine.” And the idea that the president is to blame for this is . . . well, it’s simply incomprehensible to me. It is possible, certainly, that Donald Trump (along with Andrew Cuomo) has been too bullish on the prospects for chloroquine as a tool in the fight against coronavirus. But that, if true, is a dramatically different sin. We simply cannot run our country on the assumption that “I have high hopes for this drug currently in clinical trials and hope it will eventually be fast-tracked by the FDA and prescribed by a doctor” will be heard by reasonable people as “go into your pantry right now and eat fish tank cleaner if the ingredients look similar to you to a word you heard on television.” Insofar as there is any advice to be disseminated here, it’s “don’t eat industrial cleaning products,” which one would hope is a lesson that most people have already internalized.

Not to be outdone, Forbes got into the action, too. Here is the lead paragraph from a piece on the affair by Tara Haelle, who offers “straight talk on science, medicine, health and vaccines”:
When President Trump incorrectly announced that the FDA had fast-tracked approval of the drugs chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine for treatment of COVID-19, he added, “The nice part is, it’s been around for a long time, so we know that if it—if things don’t go as planned, it’s not going to kill anybody.”

Except it just did.
No, it didn’t. And one can learn that it didn’t by simply reading the next paragraph, which confirms that, “Instead of the drug form of chloroquine phosphate, the couple ingested a chloroquine phosphate product that’s used to treat parasites in fish. ”

This being so, one wonders what the “public service” angle can be here, for if chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine do turn out to be as useful as I assume we all hope they will, they will be limited, regulated, subjected to our existing prescription regime, and delivered, to borrow a term from Tara Haelle, in “drug form.” Does NBC know this? Does Forbes? Or do they believe that, if and when a cure is found, we will see the president call a press conference at which he encourages Americans to forage around in their pantries for consumer products that contain some of the same component parts as the treatments the medical community has begun to utilize?

Insofar as these outlets had a responsibility here to “educate the people,” it seems to me that they could have better achieved this by running this story beneath a glaring “DO NOT DO THIS!” sign. Not everything in this vast and populous nation is a referendum on the president.

NBC News published March 24: Arizona Man Dies After Taking Toxic Ingredient In Attempt To Prevent Coronavirus. The man and his wife ingested chloroquine phosphate, which is used to treat sick fish, believing it would protect them from the virus. His wife is now under critical care.
NBC interviewed the wife while in ICU who blamed President Trump. Watch NBC god awful irresponsible reporting. This story STOPPED many states from using the life saving anti-malaria drugs Chloroquine and Hydroxychloroquine because of this ONE LIE by this woman who actually murdered her husband, the media and Marxist Democrats help spread. (emphasis mine)

NowThis News published March 26: A man is dead after Pres. Trump inaccurately suggested using chloroquine to treat COVID-19.
NowThis is a Marxist news source.
The Washington Free Beacon
written by Alana Goodman
Monday March 30, 2020

The Arizona woman who said that she and her 68-year-old husband ingested a substance used to clean fish tanks after hearing President Donald Trump tout chloroquine as a cure for the coronavirus has given thousands of dollars to Democratic groups and candidates over the last two years.

The woman's most recent donations, in late February, were to a Democratic PAC, the 314 Action Fund, that bills itself as the "pro-science resistance" and has vocally criticized the Trump administration's response to the coronavirus pandemic and held up her case to slam the White House.

Although local and national media outlets withheld the couple's names, the Washington Free Beacon established their identities through descriptions in local news reports, where the pair were identified by their first names and ages: Gary, 68, and Wanda, 61. The Free Beacon is withholding their identities at Wanda's request.

Federal Election Commission records show that Wanda has donated thousands of dollars to Democratic electoral groups and candidates over the past two years, including Hillary Clinton, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and EMILY's List, a group that aims to elect pro-choice female candidates.

Wanda told the Free Beacon that she and her husband were both Democrats, not Trump supporters. They heard about the potential benefits of chloroquine, an antimalarial drug, in news reports. She decided at the "spur of the moment" to try taking it, but reached for a fish tank cleaner in her pantry that contains chloroquine phosphate, a different and deadly form of the chemical. The Food and Drug Administration issued an emergency authorization for the use of chloroquine to treat coronavirus on Sunday.

"We weren't big supporters of [Trump], but we did see that they were using it in China and stuff," Wanda told the Free Beacon. "And we just made a horrible, tragic mistake," she said. "It was stupid, and it was horrible, and we should have never done it. But it's done and now I've lost my husband. And my whole life was my husband."

"We didn't think it would kill us," she added. "We thought if anything it would help us ‘cus that's what we've been hearing on the news."

In her first national news interview, Wanda told NBC News that she took the fish tank cleaner in a tragically botched attempt to follow medical advice that Trump had relayed in a press conference earlier that week.

"We saw Trump on TV—every channel—and all of his buddies and that this was safe," she said last Monday. "Trump kept saying it was basically pretty much a cure."

During a press briefing on March 19, the president pointed to medical studies indicating that chloroquine, a medication used to treat malaria, may be a "game changer" in treating the coronavirus. Wanda warned others in the same NBC News interview not to "believe anything that the president says."

Wanda's most recent contributions to Democratic causes came on Feb. 26 and 28. They went to the 314 Action Fund, a Democratic political action committee that describes itself as "the largest pro-science advocacy organization committed to electing scientists" and aims to "promote the responsible use of data driven fact based approaches in public policy."

The group has been highly critical of Trump's coronavirus policies in recent weeks. In fact, on its Facebook page, the group slammed the Trump administration for the couple's actions, writing, "There are real consequences to the White House throwing its approval behind an experimental drug trial before it's time."

In the wake of the incident, media outlets tacitly blamed Trump for the tragedy. The New York Times noted that chloroquine "has been bandied about by President Trump during White House briefings on the coronavirus pandemic as a potential ‘game changer' in the treatment of Covid-19." Others, like Axios, ran corrections noting that the couple had not ingested the chloroquine in its medical form but rather the form "used in aquariums" after initially reporting that the couple had followed the president's faulty medical advice.

Wanda does not appear to have a long history of political donations, according to FEC reports. Her contributions to Democrats rose sharply over the past few years. Her first recorded political donation was $150 to Hillary Clinton in 2016, according to FEC records. The next year she gave $550 to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. Since 2018, she has contributed approximately $6,000 to Democratic electoral groups.

She said she and her husband had decided to stay in their home to avoid catching the virus. They were spending much of their time watching media coverage.

"We were watching the news because we were self-isolating and getting pretty nervous. We were scared. I'm still scared," Wanda told the Free Beacon.

She said she and her husband are not active on social media and don't read much online news, but they get a lot of their information from television.

"I didn't know, and I didn't understand how serious it was," she added. "It was the worst situation I could ever, ever, ever imagine anybody being in."

Wanda told NBC News that her experience was a cautionary tale about taking the president's words at face value. "Oh my God, don't take anything. Don't believe anything that the president says and his people," she said. She told a local news outlet that she was still "pretty much in shock" over her husband's death.

"We were just having the best day before this happened. I made him his favorite lunch, grilled steak and asparagus and red potatoes, and we were just having the best Sunday," she said.

Posted by Princess Mononoke at 10:48 PM

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