There’s nothing worse than being around a negative person. Unfortunately for us, that’s what nearly the entire White House press corps is made up of. That’s why they’ve come to view it as a sign of dangerous incompetence to use the word “hope” as it relates to the coronavirus.
President Trump has said on several occasions in recent weeks that he hopes a certain drug, chloroquine, which has been effective against malaria, may prove useful also in treating coronavirus infections. At the daily press briefing on Tuesday, he said it would be “a total game changer” if the drug could be used as treatment.
“We’ll see what happens,” he said, “but there is a theory out there that for the medical worker, doctor, it may work.”
Why this kind of statement would trigger anyone to rage is a question that requires another kind of doctor. But it really has pushed the national media into hysteria, with reporters and commentators all but accusing the president of prescribing witchcraft as a form of medicine.
After Trump’s remarks, which amounted to nothing more than a sincere expression of hope, Los Angeles Times columnist Michael Hiltzik accused Trump of having “openly offered the public a false hope, or at the very least a completely unproven hope.”
What the hell is an “unproven hope”? The word hope in and of itself includes an element of the unproven. But hope also includes optimism that, hey, something good might happen. There’s nothing wrong with that.
At the press briefing on March 20, Trump again said, “I happen to feel good about” chloroquine as a treatment and even said, “I’m not saying it will [work], but I think that people may be surprised.”
To that, NBC’s Peter Alexander asked if the president was “giving Americans a false sense of hope.”
This is, again, about a treatment option that leading experts say has not been fully tested but that some evidence points to as a useful treatment. News reports even say that doctors across the country may have been stockpiling that very medicine — even prescribing it for themselves and their family as a direct response to the spread of the coronavirus.
To give a “false sense of hope” is to tell someone that a desirable outcome is possible when you know yourself that it is not, or that it is extremely unlikely. Right now, nobody knows for sure either way, and so any sense of hope can’t possibly be false.
Someone tell Peter Alexander.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the White House coronavirus task force official and the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, has himself said he would prescribe chloroquine as treatment if for no other reason than to give — what’s that word again? — hope.
“Yes, of course, I mean, particularly if people have no other option, you want to give them hope,” he said. “In fact … physicians throughout the country can prescribe that in an off-label way, which means they can write it for something that it was not originally approved for.”
The media’s witch-hunt on chloroquine is not unlike their efforts to nail down Fauci and his colleague Dr. Deborah Birx on an exact number of deaths we might see by the end of this year. They have projections, but they can’t possibly know. And it’s not misleading for them to say that they hope — hope! — the projections are overstated.
There was nothing wrong with Trump saying he had hoped the United States might largely open back up for normal business by Easter Sunday. He probably believed it. I believed it before he had even set that as an aspirational date. But presented with new information, he changed his mind. That doesn’t mean his initial optimism was harmful.
Hope, contrary to what the national media are saying, is not a bad thing — especially right now, when certainty isn’t an option.
