I was very happy on Thursday to see President Trump talking about hydroxychloroquine, and urging the FDA to expedite clinical trials on it. We were one of many outlets to pick up on the Tucker Carlson segment from Wednesday, and fortunately all the coverage got Trump’s attention.

He did exactly what he should have done: He told the public he was directing the FDA to get on it, and he expressed that he was hopeful about it. He did not try to sell it as a miracle cure. He simply talked in typically optimistic Trump tones about what was going on.

Needless to say, if Trump sees something positively, the media are going to throw shade on it. It’s what they do. The anti-Trump and anti-hydroxychoroquine onslaught was typified by this USA Today editorial, slamming Trump for talking about it and accusing him of peddling “false hope” and “snake oil.”

I don’t know how many doctors are on the USA Today editorial board. I’d probably set the over/under at zero. And I’d bet a lot of money there’s no one on that board who’s ever treated a COVID-19 patient. But Drs. Jeff Colyer and Daniel Hinthorn have, and they wrote in the Wall Street Journal over the weekend about their very real experience treating COVID-19 patients with hydroxychloroquine.

According to them, there is nothing false about the hope it provides, and there’s no snake oil involved:

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A couple of careful studies of hydroxychloroquine are in progress, but the results may take weeks or longer. Infectious-disease experts are already using hydroxychloroquine clinically with some success. With our colleague Dr. Joe Brewer in Kansas City, Mo., we are using hydroxychloroquine in two ways: to treat patients and as prophylaxis to protect health-care workers from infection.

We had been using the protocol outlined in the research from China, but we’ve switched to the combination prescribed in the French study. Our patients appear to be showing fewer symptoms.

Our experience suggests that hydroxychloroquine, with or without a Z-Pak, should be a first-line treatment. Unfortunately, there is already a shortage of hydroxychloroquine. The federal government should immediately contract with generic manufacturers to ramp up production. Any stockpiles should be released.

The usual protocol is not to start using a drug widely to treat a particular illness, until there is an extensive clinical trial. These clinical trials tend to take months or even years. It would be outside typical norms to just start giving hydroxychloroquine to patients based on the anecdotal evidence we’ve seen in China, France and now Kansas.

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But it’s also outside normal protocols to shut down society over a pandemic, so we’re sort of past the point where we worry about norms.

The media’s favorite doctor, Anthony Fauci, has not said hydroxychoroquine doesn’t work on COVID-19. He’s said it hasn’t been thoroughly tested. Trump makes no claim to the contrary.

But as Drs. Colyer and Hinthorn point out, we do not have the luxury of unlimited time to conduct enough clinical trials to make us totally comfortable. This virus continues to spread at an alarming rate and the economic price we’re paying may be worse than the health impact. If there’s a drug already on the market and there are early indications it might work – and there are already doctors using it with encouraging results – then we need to ramp up production and try it on more patients.

And the media need to stop calling it “snake oil” just because Trump is excited about it and they hate him. Anything that has a chance of working deserves a shot at this point. And they have no business casting aspersions on hopeful news that could help people just because they detest the president who’s talking about it.