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One advantage enjoyed by those hyping the promise of a product is that it takes time for skeptics to do actual research. In the case of President Donald Trump's recent promotion of hydroxychloroquine to treat COVID-19, the time lag between hype and facts allowed for something that sounded like a conspiracy story to build.

The president, in a lunge for good news to announce, began pitching the promise of this drug, which has long been approved for use against malaria. “What do you have to lose? What do you have to lose? Take it,” he said recently of COVID-19 patients. “I’m not a doctor, but I have common sense.” After weeks of mounting death tolls due to coronavirus, however, the drug's efficacy for this purpose remains in the testing phase, with red flags raised about its effects and experts sticking to their earlier precautions.

Credible professionals of all kinds in the administration who push back on the side of the facts keep finding themselves in the risky role of whistleblowers. Nonpartisan national-security experts were crucial in debunking Trump's assertions about alleged Ukraine involvement in Democratic high jinks. Law enforcement investigators ended up knocking down exotic pro-Trump "theories" about Russian election meddling. Navy Capt. Brett Crozier, ex-commander of the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt, was relieved after word spread of his concern about the danger coronavirus was posing to his crew.

In this context comes the demotion of Dr. Rick Bright, who says he was wrongfully ousted as director of the federal agency overseeing the development of a coronavirus vaccine. "Specifically, and contrary to misguided directives, I limited the broad use of chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine, promoted by the administration as a panacea, but which clearly lack scientific merit,” Bright said in a letter released this week. “ … Placing politics and cronyism ahead of science puts lives at risk."

Apparently Bright wasn't the first medical expert to run afoul of the White House for telling the truth about coronavirus. According to the The Wall Street Journal, Trump threatened to fire Dr. Nancy Messonnier, director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, after she warned in February that the coronavirus outbreak could become a pandemic and disrupt daily life.

Believers in Trump and his product endorsements would find it easy to accept that straitlaced professionals and regulators would hold back a magic bullet for shortsighted or nefarious reasons. In this way, his chloroquine campaign suggested a conspiracy. After all, someone would have to be blamed for holding back such an obvious solution.

Hope has vanished a beautiful election campaign story — that an American-made product endorsed early by its self-declared "wartime" president and his publicists would quickly slay the invisible viral invader. This episode of "POTUS Knows Best" ends sadly — with the coronavirus pandemic still raging and no cure at hand.