MSNBC's Rachel Maddow wants President Trump's daily coronavirus press conferences to be taken off the air, because lives depend on it. Oh, and hope in the midst of these turbulent times? We cannot have that! She concluded her brief screed by suggesting that continuing to air them would lead to more people dying!
Anyway, the progressive commentator made the outlandish remarks on her Friday show where accused Trump of spreading misinformation and false hope.
Referring to the malaria drug chloroquine, she told viewers: "President Trump today again just flat out wrong in public about this malaria drug that has gotten stuck in his mind quite some distance from the facts. Yesterday, President Trump proclaimed that that drug had been approved as a coronavirus treatment and would be available almost immediately for use. Within moments, the FDA had to clean that up because that is not true at all. It is not at all approved for coronavirus treatment."
Maddow was technically correct that the FDA has not approved the drug for coronavirus treatment, but she misled her own viewers when she accused Trump of spreading misinformation, because it wasn't that simple. While studies are being done to test the drug's effectiveness against the virus, doctors are legally allowed to give it to patients for off label use if they believe it would beneficial.
Still, she claimed that, "telling people a fairy tale like that is cruel and harmful and needlessly diverting and wildly irresponsible from anyone in any leadership role."
After running through some more alleged instances of Trump raising false hope, she came to the conclusion that, "there may be other people in the federal government who are saying things that the not true, but these daily briefings from the White House are a litany of things from the President that would be awesome if they were true and happening but they're not and so the sooner we come to terms with that, I think the better for all of us."
In Maddow's mind, the best way for to solve this problem and to save lives would be to no longer carry the White House's daily press conference:
If it were up to me and it's not, I would stop putting those briefings on live TV. Not out of spite but because it's misinformation, if the President does end up saying anything true, you can run it as tape, but if he keeps lying like he has been every day on stuff this important, we should --- all of us should stop broadcasting it. Honestly, it's going to cost lives.
Here's the relevant transcript:
MSNBC's The Rachel Maddow Show
March 20, 2020
9:51 p.m. EasternRACHEL MADDOW: "You got to be [very] careful when you say fairly effective." President Trump today again just flat out wrong in public about this malaria drug that has gotten stuck in his mind quite some distance from the facts. Yesterday, President Trump proclaimed that that drug had been approved as a coronavirus treatment and would be available almost immediately for use. Within moments, the FDA had to clean that up because that is not true at all. It is not at all approved for coronavirus treatment. But the President loves saying things like, you know, there's a drug we've got. It's very effective. It's approved already. Everybody is going to get it. He loves saying things like that because that would be a lovely thing to tell people. Unless of course, that's not true in which case telling people a fairytale like that is cruel and harmful and needlessly diverting and wildly irresponsible from anyone in any leadership role. It's actually wildly responsible if somebody said that to you from a bar stool if we could go to bars anymore but to get from someone at the presidential podium, nevertheless, he keeps doing it.
(....)
Even when he's talking about what he has done or what he will do, he's consistently living and giving you happy talk that is stuff that the federal government isn't actually doing and it's making people around the country count on the fact the federal government is doing that stuff when they're not. I mean, there may be other people in the federal government who are saying things that are true, but these daily briefings from the White House are a litany of things from the President that would be awesome if they were true, if they were happening, but they're not and so the sooner we come to terms with that, I think the better for all of us. If it were up to me and it's not, I would stop putting those briefings on live TV. Not out of spite but because it's misinformation, if the President does end up saying anything true, you can run it as tape, but if he keeps lying like he has been every day on stuff this important, we should --- all of us should stop broadcasting it. Honestly, it's going to cost lives.
