How Not to Sell a Coronavirus Cure, for Trump

How Not to Sell a Coronavirus Cure

Drug company salespeople must be chosen for their personalities and ability to put doctors and office managers at ease, and to convince them that they need their companies’ medicines.  So, one day, Trump tries to sell American voters that he has developed the cure, and God helped him discover the cure to the Coronavirus infection.  Since he wasn’t going to get a vaccine before the election, he personally found The Cure, instead.  And, he was going to give it to all sick Americans, for free.  Sale almost made.  But, the next day, addressing the same news audience, the drug representative calls the leading woman politician, the vice presidential candidate, and the elected Senator from the largest state, California, Kamala Harris, a ‘Monster’ and a ‘Communist’.  So is one of the side effects of the medicine  a wild imagination, or Turret’s Syndrome?  Are you going to buy a claimed Cure from a man who acts crazily?

Irrespective of politics and an election, everybody wants and needs a Cure.  But turning off an entire half of the public who back the other party by characterizations that they know to be false, won’t give you the 60% to 70% that you might need for herd immunity, which is your desire.  Or does everybody have to catch the Coronavirus first, then get transferred to an expensive hospital to get the Cure?  This is where a vaccine is much less expensive.

To add to the disbelief of the infected salesman in question, he has been totally private and evasive about all aspects of his medical condition while infected with the Coronavirus, including when he last tested negative, so we can judge whether he went to two events even when he knew that he was infected, whether and when he was on oxygen, what his temperature was, what is his pulmonary efficiency, what did his lung X-rays look like, and was he gasping for air during his Balcony scene?  Adding to the mistrust is his doctor, who has been totally evasive, and now only communicates by statements on paper.  

To add total disbelief for this drug representative, we learned yesterday that when he unexpectedly went into the hospital on a weekend allegedly to start a physical, he made everybody sign an NDA, a non-disclosure agreement.

Then the salesman has led the nation to ignore the CDC advice to halt a deadly national pandemic, packing people at his rallies, fighting masking restrictions, encouraging them to cheer, violating crowd size limitations, and holding them in place for hours.  Insisting on States’ reopening before the infection rate has declined sufficiently.  Refusing to give states money for medical caretakers and PPE.

There are also questions about the availability and cost of the medication being hawked by the Salesman in Chief.  Trump was given an 8 gram dosage of Regeneron’s REGN-COV2 monoclonal antibody mix.  Bill Gates was on CNN, and said that they are testing to see if the dosage can be lowered to 0.7 gram, and still be effective.  Then, it might sell for $100 a dose, and become affordable.  That means that for Trump’s 8 mg dose, it would cost $1,140 dollars, hardly affordable to everybody.  Especially if they had to spend three days in the hospital each, with a phalanx of 12 round the clock physicians.  Another source said that the treatment cost $96,000.  Stand by.

Only testing on 275 individuals has been released by Regeneron.  I hope none of them developed Tourettes.

There was also the pushing of his first miracle cures:  hydroxychloroquine with zinc and a common Z-pack.

Now, Trump has replaced his experts Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx with a non-virologist, Dr. Scott Atlas, which further destroys any confidence which we might have attached to Trump through his advisors.  Actually, Dr. Atlas is a neurological radiologist from Stanford.  The greatest contribution he could make is to persuade Trump to take a brain scan so that future doctors could diagnose what made up this unique (fill in your own description) President.

The label Communist used by Trump has always bothered me.  We know that Trump sided with Putin against American intelligence agencies who reported Russian interference in the 2016 election.  Trump is again denying Russian interference and taking no action on that in the 2020 election.  We know that Trump kept trying to get a deal for Trump Moscow up to Election Day in 2016, promising Putin the Penthouse.  We know that Eric said that Trump was financed through the Russians, and that Trump has $300 million in debts about to come due.  But, Trump still goes to court to hide who owns his debts.  We won’t even mention Trump’s love affair with North Korea’s Communist and cruel dictator Kim Jong Un, since that was just a come-on that any salesman makes.  Except, that has accomplished nothing except buying time for North Korea to develop nuclear weapons and longer range missiles.  The Xi Jin Ping affair has changed into making China a scape goat for Trump’s mishandling of the pandemic.

About Dennis SILVERMAN

I am a retired Professor of Physics and Astronomy at U C Irvine. For two decades I have been active in learning about energy and the environment, and in reporting on those topics for a decade. For the last four years I have added science policy. Lately, I have been reporting on the Covid-19 pandemic of our times.
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