Maybe this will get NBC’s attention.
In an interview Tuesday night with a Philadelphia radio show, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the physician who’s become one of the most recognized faces on television during the COVID-19 crisis, said he wouldn’t hesitate to prescribe a known antimalarial drug to a patient who’d been infected with the coronavirus if there were no other option available.
As President Donald Trump put it in a news briefing last week, “What the hell do you have to lose?”
Those weren’t the words used by Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who has become a fixture of Trump’s White House media briefings on the coronavirus.
But they would have summed up his viewpoint pretty well as it came out during a WNTP-AM broadcast while answering a question about chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine, two drugs that most Americans probably never dreamed existed before words like “social distancing” and “flatten the curve” entered the national vocabulary.
When asked by host Chris Stigall about the prospects that the drugs could be useful for coronavirus patients, Fauci gave an equivocal yes — that might not have been as...