White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany called out CNN anchor Chris Cuomo Wednesday for mocking President Donald Trump for taking hydroxychloroquine after Cuomo took a less safe version of the drug for his coronavirus treatment.
.@PressSec calls out @ChrisCuomo for criticizing Trump for taking hydroxychloroquine, an FDA approved drug, while Cuomo himself took a “less safe version” of hydroxychloroquine to treat his case of COVID-19. pic.twitter.com/zqMEU65RvP
— Julio Rosas (@Julio_Rosas11) May 20, 2020
“You had Chris Cuomo saying the president knows that hydroxychloroquine is not supported by science, he knows it has been flagged by his own people and he’s using it,” McEnany said at Wednesday’s White House press briefing.
“Cuomo mocked the president for this” but “it turns out that Chris Cuomo took a less safe version of it called quinine, which the FDA removed from the market in 2006 because it had serious side effects, including death. So really interesting to have that criticism of the president.” (RELATED: CNN’s Cuomo Mocks Trump Over Hydroxychloroquine – A Version Of It Was Included In His Own COVID-19 Treatment)
Cuomo was diagnosed with COVID-19 on March 31. His wife, Cristina, detailed his treatment protocol in a series of articles for her wellness magazine The Purist and wrote about how one of the medicines her husband took was quinine of which hydroxychloroquine is its synthetic derivative.
The sale of non-approved brands of quinine was banned by the FDA in 2007 due to its negative side affects although it remains a widely used treatment for malaria.
By contrast, McEnany said hydroxychloroquine is “a drug that has been in use for 65 years for lupus, arthritis and malaria. It has a very good safety profile.”
Cristina Cuomo’s blog posts also included such peculiar treatments as putting bleach in her bathwater and the use of a “body charger.”