On March 19, President Trump promoted two drugs, chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine, as potential treatments for COVID-19 after Fox News spent days exaggerating the drugs’ effectiveness. Since then, there has been a run on these drugs, which are needed to treat other medical conditions, and a man in Arizona died after ingesting chloroquine phosphate because he thought it would protect against the coronavirus.

Much of the initial coverage of these drugs on Fox was spurred by a lawyer named Gregory Rigano. Rigano, who was described as an adviser to Stanford University’s medical school despite no actual affiliation, appeared on Fox multiple times to tout the potential benefits of these drugs. At the heart of his claims was a study conducted in France which shows a small number of coronavirus patients benefiting from hydroxychloroquine. But as CNN’s Sanjay Gupta pointed out, the study suffers from a number of serious limitations, including that three patients excluded from the study were later sent to the intensive care unit and that patients were monitored for only six days.

These drugs may eventually prove effective in treating COVID-19, but additional study is needed. Meanwhile, Fox hosts like Sean Hannity continue to recklessly promote these drugs to an audience that is understandably eager for a cure, with little evidence of their effectiveness.