Blood tests that measure a person’s antibodies to the coronavirus could be a powerful tool to determine when it’s safe to reopen the country. But concerns about the accuracy and availability of the tests — which detect whether a person has ever been exposed to the virus, and are different from the tests used to…
On Monday, April 13, former Ronald Reagan Cabinet member Bill Bennett went on Fox News to give his expert opinion on COVID-19. Bennett is probably best known as a right-wing moral “crusader,” who, it turns out, was full of shit. But just because you spew mostly methane doesn’t mean you can’t get a place to speak to…
On March 2, the United States reached 100 confirmed cases of COVID-19. Three weeks later, the country had 34,000 cases, over 400 deaths, and was rocketing toward a massive, uncontrolled epidemic that has, so far, taken the lives of over 16,000 Americans. But three weeks after New Zealand hit 100 cases of COVID-19, there are…
For months, every time Donald Trump was confronted over his downplaying of COVID-19, his lack of a national policy, his failure to plan for the impact of the disease or to develop any consistent response, Trump had one constant reply: look at the 2009 H1N1 epidemic. In appearance after appearance, Trump declared that then-president Barack Obama had…
Almost from the beginning, Donald Trump has been pushing the use of chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for COVID-19 despite the lack of a single random trial indicating that the drug had any net positive effect. The result of Trump’s relentless medicine show hectoring has been that doctors have issued so many off-label prescriptions that there is…