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Recent editorial did not provide whole story

To the editor:

The president had remarked that chloroquine had some very strong possibilities for treating our present virus infestation. It started tremendous criticism by the press as not having time to be thoroughly vetted. Also, it had not been available long enough to gather side effects.

To be as brief as possible: I was in the battle zone of Korea in 1951 and 1952, through a logistics error, for 18 months. I was given chloroquine in the field but don’t remember the frequency. On the troop ship home we were given chloroquine. This was administered, to the best of my recollection, every three days for nine days. It was akin to a court martial offense to resist or hide the pill. Again, to the best of my recollection, it was administered just before meal time. You didn’t take the pill, you didn’t eat.

A local newspaper editorial calls the use of chloroquine as “Yankee ingenuity possibly not too smart.” Yankee ingenuity is throwing a drowning man a wooden 2 x 4 and not a steel reinforcing bar standing next to it. Liberal socialist ingenuity is sending both bar and beam to the department of disease control to determine which would float and save the man. The editorial was based on the article of a man and his wife swallowing a fish tank cleaner with chloroquine; He died; she didn’t. ” Stupidity run amok.”

Dr. Daniel Brooks, medical director of the Banner Poison and Drug Information said the couple read about chloroquine on the internet – a gold mine of misinformation. The couple had it on the shelf using it to clean fish tanks. AXIOS, an American news website decided to revisit the happening. The media reported false headlines without acknowledging the full picture. Editorials should adopt the same “American ingenuity” of “revisit and verify.”

Charles Deibert

Reedsville

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