On March 18th, on Fox News, Tucker Carlson opened a three-minute segment about the study by saying, of the United States, “This is a country of science.” He then introduced a lawyer, Gregory Rigano, whom he identified as an adviser to Stanford University’s medical school. Rigano had self-published a white paper about chloroquine, on Google Docs; his connection to the French research was otherwise unclear. He was appearing remotely, wearing a suit and sitting in front of a cold fireplace. When Carlson asked him why he thought the study was important, Rigano responded, “The President has the authority to authorize the use of hydroxychloroquine against coronavirus immediately. He has cut more red tape at the F.D.A. than any other President in history.”
Charlie Kirk, the founder of the conservative nonprofit Turning Point USA, tweeted the segment, exhorting his nearly two million followers to “RT If President @realDonaldTrump should immediately move to make this available.” Most media outlets, though, quickly challenged the credibility of Rigano and that of his white paper’s co-author, James Todaro, a cryptocurrency investor who has tweeted about having a medical degree from Columbia. HuffPost called them “hucksters.”
Joan Donovan, who studies “media manipulation and disinformation campaigns” at the Shorenstein Center, at the Harvard Kennedy School, called them “bitcoin entrepreneurs” and pointed out that “neither do research on viruses.” She wrote, “This is dangerous because people are now tweeting about trying to get their doctors to prescribe anti-malaria drugs. Worse, thousands of people think they can cure coronavirus by drinking tonic water.” (Tonic water contains quinine.) Stanford Health Care posted an “important notice” on its Web site: “A widely circulating Google document claiming to have identified a potential treatment for covid-19 in consultation with Stanford’s School of Medicine is not legitimate.”
