Johnson is one of Trump’s more energetic defenders in the Senate, and has used his committee to promote the president’s unfounded claims that Joe Biden was up to no good in Ukraine. He has also spent months assailing public-health officials for refusing to support the use of hydroxychloroquine.
If you have already forgotten the whole hydroxychloroquine thing, Trump used to tout it as a miracle cure, and members of the Trump cult fervently insisted he was correct, seizing on any scrap of positive evidence to support his case. But evidence piled up against its efficacy. By June, the FDA revoked emergency-use authorization for the drug, concluding it was ineffective. Trump hasn’t mentioned hydroxychloroquine in weeks and weeks.
Johnson, though, hasn’t forgotten. Yesterday’s hearing featured a stacked witness list, with three of the few remaining oddball supporters of the drug arguing against well-regarded Harvard public-health expert Ashish Jha. Johnson railed against “the disinformation, the scaremongering, and the prescription log jam that has been created by bureaucrats.”
Dr. Jha wrote a NYTimes editorial after participating in the farce of a hearing
Almost nine months into the pandemic, during a surge, with 1,500 daily deaths, senators saw fit to rehash a medical dead end. Trial after trial has found no evidence that hydroxychloroquine improves outcomes for Covid-19 patients; some studies have found that it causes more harm than good.
Neither Ron Johnson, the Wisconsin Republican senator who is the chairman of the committee, nor his chosen witnesses — three doctors who have pushed hydroxychloroquine — displayed more than a passing interest in evidence. Intuition and the personal experiences of individual doctors were acclaimed as guiding principles.
The hearing encapsulated the competing narratives of the pandemic. On one side was a group of people essentially arguing that the coronavirus was no problem because we had a cheap and easily available therapy. On the other side, I argued that the pandemic is hard, that we have few easy solutions, and that we have to work constantly to protect lives through public health measures while we await widespread vaccinations. It’s easy to see which narrative is more appealing.