Shortly after President Trump touted chloroquine as a potential cure for COVID-19, the media triumphantly reported that a man had died from taking homemade chloroquine due to Trump's recommendation. It turned out that the man's wife fed him some fish tank cleaner. She even partook of it with him, except that he died while she didn't. As a dedicated murder mystery reader, I didn't blame Trump. My suspicions were focused elsewhere. It turns out that my instincts may have been right on the money. Here's the story the drive-by media didn't tell you:

On March 20, President Trump expressed his hope that chloroquine (also prescribed as hydroxychloroquine) might be an effective way to treat COVID-19, especially when used in conjunction with Azithromycin, an antibiotic. The next day, he reiterated that hope in a tweet.

Two days later, Axios reported, "Man dies after self-medicating with chloroquine phosphate." Axios articles have bullet points to guide readers. In the case of what was a brief, and seemingly bizarre, news squiblet, the bullet points said "Why it matters," "Worth noting," and "Go deeper." That last bullet point led readers to an article entitled "Trump touts drugs not yet approved by FDA for treating coronavirus." The reader could almost hear the Axios editors adding, "hint, hint."

Sure enough, by March 24, the narrative was in place. President Trump was responsible for killing a man and almost killing a woman. Indeed, these narratives were not subtle. This NPR tweet is a stand-in for what all the media outlets were doing:

Even as that lie was racing around the world, the truth was struggling to get out. In this case, the truth was that the couple hadn't taken chloroquine at all. Instead, they'd ingested a fish tank cleaner that had "chloroquine phosphate," a deadly chemical.

Even though a fish tank cleaner has nothing to do with a long recognized and legal anti-malarial drug, the media and the woman herself pushed the anti-Trump narrative. Indeed, the woman explicitly condemned Trump: "Don't believe anything that the President says and his people."

On March 28, I wrote a post for publication on March 29 about the fact that Trump was probably right about chloroquine's efficacy and that the media were almost certainly wrong when they rushed out to condemn it solely because he praised it. By the time I wrote that post, I'd been saying to friends for a couple of days that I didn't believe that anyone could be stupid enough to think eating fish tank cleaner with chloroquine phosphate is the same as getting a prescription for chloroquine from a doctor.

Instead, I told my friends, look to Agatha Christie or Dorothy Sayers for answers. Both of those women wrote mysteries in which the killer also ingested small amounts of the poison to deflect attention.

When I wrote the post, I included the same point I'd made to my friends, although I did it parenthetically. On the evidence available, I had a niggling gut feeling that stupidity didn't explain events: "In an Agatha Christie mystery, the truth would have been that the woman cleverly figured out how to kill her husband."

By March 30, thanks to some excellent reporting from the Washington Free Beacon, there was more information about the woman who survived. Most people noted the fact that she was a fanatic anti-Trumper and "pro-science" person. In the post I wrote for publication on March 31, I obsessed about something different, which was the fact that the story didn't ring true:

Either this couple was staggeringly stupid (which is, admittedly, a possibility) or, as he said, something doesn't compute. The whole thing reads like something out of a mystery novel, with the narrative being too pat: Trump is hopeful about a drug, a Trump-hating woman "spontaneously" decides that Trump explicitly recommended eating fish tank cleaner, her husband dies, and the media have a ready-made headline. No matter how you spin it, it's a fishy story, at best.

Had I been keeping up with Techno Fog on Twitter, I wouldn't have been so delicate in my hints. It turns out that "Court records show the wife who fed her husband fish cleaner (poison?) has a history of mental illness (paranoia, depression) and had considered divorcing her husband as far back as 2012":

Here's an excellent rule of thumb when navigating stories that are hostile to President Trump: assume that everything you hear is a lie, whether it's from the media or from the anti-Trump source about which the media is reporting. Also, you can learn a lot about human nature and sneaky crimes by reading murder mysteries.

Incidentally, I'm with Techno Fog in that I'm not saying the woman committed a crime. I'm only saying the police should look closely at her actions. It's equally possible that her husband was simply a victim of a woman who is malignantly stupid.