Trump defends disproved COVID-19 treatment
Associated PressWASHINGTON — President Donald Trump issued a stout defense Tuesday of a disproved use of a malaria drug as a treatment for the coronavirus, hours after social media companies moved to take down videos promoting its use as potentially harmful misinformation. “I think they’re very respected doctors,” Trump said, adding they believed in the drug. Trump, his son Donald Trump Jr., and others shared video of the event on Facebook and Twitter, prompting both companies to step in and remove the content as part of an aggressive push to keep the sites free of potentially harmful information about the virus — though not before more than 17 million people had seen one version of the video circulating on the web. “He’s got a very good approval rating, and I like that,” Trump said, adding that Fauci and White House coronavirus task force coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx work for him, “And yet they’re highly thought of but nobody likes me.” Fauci has become an off-and-on target of Trump and some of his White House aides and outside allies, who disagreed with the doctor’s early recommendation to shut down the economy as a way to slow the virus, which is surging again in parts of the country, mostly in the South and West. This is what I do,” Fauci said on ABC’s “Good Morning America.” “This is what I’ve been trained for my entire professional life and I’ll continue to do it.” Facebook, Twitter and YouTube began scrubbing their sites of the video of the doctors on Monday.