This week, yet another health official found himself sidelined by the White House. This time, it was the man in charge of leading the government's development of a coronavirus vaccine: Rick Bright, director of the Department of Health and Human Services’ Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority. He said he'd been pressured to direct resources toward the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine—one of several “potentially dangerous drugs promoted by those with political connections”—and that he was ousted for insisting that the federal government invest in "safe and scientifically vetted solutions, and not in drugs, vaccines and other technologies that lack scientific merit."

Hydroxychloroquine has become a much-hyped miracle cure among some on the right, including the president himself, Fox News hosts Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson, and trade adviser Peter Navarro, who has been warring with Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, over Fauci's repeatedly stating that there is no clinical evidence backing it as a COVID-19 cure. But perhaps no one has gone to bat for unapproved, off-label use of the anti-malarial drug more than host Laura Ingraham, who relentlessly promoted hydroxychloroquine and laid siege to medical professionals urging caution from the perch of her evening show, The Ingraham Angle, with its millions of viewers.

Ingraham was on the hydroxychloroquine beat early. The buzz about the drug started in Silicon Valley and took off on March 13 when blockchain investor James Todaro tweeted, "There is growing evidence of Chloroquine as a highly effective treatment for COVID-19," along with a link to a Google doc, in which he and others wrote to make their case. Just three days later, on March 16, Ingraham hosted one of Todaro's coauthors, lawyer Gregory Rigano. And four days after that, on March 20, Ingraham was saying on her show that "the FDA needs to hop onto this pronto" and that she would "happily volunteer" for a trial study, presumably aware that would require her to first contract the virus. That same day, she tweeted that "many hospitals" were using the drug and seeing "very promising results," citing a doctor at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York. Twitter later deleted the tweet, since it violated the site's rules against spreading false information about coronavirus—the source Ingraham used didn't work at Lenox Hill.

Not only did Ingraham continue to promote the drug, she also started assailing public health experts. On April 3, Ingraham said, "I love everybody, love the medical profession. But they want a double-blind controlled study on whether the sky is blue"—implying that using a powerful drug for a new virus sans replicable studies was as obviously logical as the observed laws of nature. The week of April 8, Harvard Medical School professor William Haseltine appeared on Fox News's The Daily Briefing and referred to hydroxychloroquine as a "quack cure" and warned that it "will have a very mild effect on changing the course of the disease, if it has any effect at all." Ingraham responded on her own show, calling Haseltine's comments "completely disgusting" and accusing him and anyone else questioning the drug of wanting to undermine the president.

She also advocated that CDC director Robert Redfield be fired for dismissing the drug as a cure for the novel coronavirus. By this time, patients with arthritis and lupus, two conditions that actually require treatment with hydroxychloroquine, were struggling to find the drug, due to shortages resulting from its being hyped as a coronavirus cure. And a man in Arizona had died after ingesting a form of chloroquine meant to clean fish tanks.