Steven J. Hatfill, Who Promoted HCQ During the Pandemic, Appointed to Lead Pandemic Prevention Agency at HHS By Debra Heine
An early promoter of hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) as an effective early treatment for COVID-19 has been appointed senior advisor for the Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response (ASPR) at Health and Human Services (HHS).
Pathologist and biological weapons expert Steven J. Hatfill, a White House adviser during President Donald Trump’s first term, assumed the role earlier this month.
Hatfill’s name should be familiar to most Americans.
While working as a consultant in 2001 at the Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), he was falsely accused of being behind the Anthrax attacks which killed five people and sickened seventeen.
He was formally exonerated in 2008, and the Department of Justice paid him $4.6 million to settle his lawsuit that same year.
Now, as head of ASPR, Hatfield is responsible for preparing the U.S. for public health disasters, which include biological and chemical attacks.
Hatfill worked with trade adviser Peter Navarro during Trump’s first term to promote hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for COVID-19 during the early months of the pandemic.
In the Spring of 2020, after multiple doctors and infectious decease experts from across the country reported that they were having success prescribing HCQ to COVID patients as part of their early treatment protocols, Trump told stunned reporters that he was taking the drug himself as a preventative measure.
The president explained that he’d received “many” letters from doctors expressing confidence in the drug, including the late Dr. Vladimir Zelenko, a doctor from Westchester, New York who claimed he’d given the hydroxychloroquine, azithromycin and zinc cocktail to “over 300 patients” and hadn’t lost a single one.
“I’ve heard good stories,” he said. “And if it’s not good, I’ll tell you right? But I’m not going to get hurt by it. It’s been around for 40 years for malaria, for lupus, for other things.”
Fauci and other health officials pushed back, claiming there was no evidence HCQ was an effective treatment for the coronavirus, and promoted the arguably toxic Big Pharma money-maker Remdesivir instead.
Health care providers were given a green light to use Hydroxychloroquine in March of 2020 through the emergency use authorization, but tens of millions of doses of the drug were put in limbo that June after the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) revoked the emergency use authorization. Even though the drug had been safely used for decades, FDA bureaucrats deemed the drug too risky to treat COVID-19, and likely ineffective to boot.
Throughout the rest of 2020, social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter censored users who promoted the drug as an effective treatment against COVID.
And the intense anti-Hydroxychloroquine narrative pushed by the media resulted in the drug becoming an unpopular choice for American doctors.
Studies, however, would eventually show that the use of Hydroxychloroquine to treat the coronavirus could dramatically increase survival rates.
Dr. Mary Talley Bowden, an ear, nose and throat specialist in Houston, Texas, told The Defender, “I treated over 6,000 COVID-19 patients during the pandemic, a large number of those patients took hydroxychloroquine, and no one suffered any serious side effects.”
Navarro and Hatfill clashed with Anthony S. Fauci, then-director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), and others over the matter.
“I had 60 million tablets of HCQ that Tony Fauci and [CDC] wouldn’t allow the American public to use because of their Hydroxy Hysteria,” Navarro tweeted in June 2021. “Blood on @JohnBerman @cnn and Saint Fauci’s hands. More than 50,000 Americans would be alive today,” he added.
Navarro also blasted the FDA’s decision to pull the emergency authorization of HCQ in June of 2020.
“This is a Deep State blindside by bureaucrats who hate the administration they work for more than they’re concerned about saving American lives,” Navarro fumed in an interview with the New York Times.
Hatfield, like Robert Kennedy Jr., has maintained that the regime’s hostility toward effective repurposed drugs like HCQ and Ivermectin, was about the push for the emergency authorization of the experimental mRNA vaccines and Remdesivir.
“If you have an effective outpatient treatment that’s safe, it makes it very difficult to get an EUA [Emergency Use Authorization],” Hatfield told War Room host Steve Bannon years later. “To have $11.00 worth of tablets keep you out of the hospital and save your life … I don’t think this was going to be allowed.”
Earlier this month, Hatfill told the Washington Post that hydroxychloroquine is a safe and effective treatment for the coronavirus, and that there are “5,000 controlled, randomized” and peer reviewed studies to back that up.
“They gave the drug to the president,” Hatfill noted. “There is no ambiguity there. It is a safe drug.”
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