U.S. House panel slams Trump’s COVID response; report mentions early role from Mehmet Oz

Mehmet Oz’s advocacy for the drug hydroxychloroquine in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic is cited in a new congressional report that accuses former President Donald Trump’s administration of pressuring the Food and Drug Administration to endorse unproven treatments and vaccines.

The report released Wednesday says the Trump White House interfered with the FDA by pressing the agency to authorize hydroxychloroquine, a malaria drug, despite no proof it worked against COVID-19. Early on, the pressure came partly at the urging of Oz, the physician and talk-show host who is now the Republican nominee for U.S. Senate in Pennsylvania.

Emails from Oz detailed in the report demonstrate the direct line that he and other conservative TV personalities had to top officials in the White House from the earliest days of the pandemic.

His inclusion in the report, authored by a panel of mostly Democrats investigating the coronavirus pandemic, comes less than 80 days from a key Senate race, and could provide ammunition for Democrats who have already looked to attack him for questionable medical advice.

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The report describes how, in March 2020, Oz sent three emails to senior White House officials — including Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and adviser — urging them to call for studies of the drug. At the time, medical professionals and the government were desperate for a COVID treatment and early data suggested it might help. But Oz continued to tout the drug’s potential as late as this spring on the campaign trail, long after multiple large studies found it was ineffective against COVID.

“At the outset of the pandemic, Dr. Mehmet Oz spoke with health experts worldwide who were seeing hydroxychloroquine ... as viable treatment options for desperately ill COVID patients and he offered to fund a clinical trial at Columbia University,” said Rachel Tripp, Oz’s senior communications adviser.

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Oz’s actions are contained within one paragraph of the 42-page report. The report primarily focuses on the Trump administration’s pressure campaign surrounding vaccines and treatments such as hydroxychloroquine, which was developed to treat malaria and also is approved to treat lupus. The drug was generic, and therefore cheap and readily available.

Oz’s promotion of hydroxychloroquine is well documented. He publicly advocated for it in TV appearances in 2020. And he’s mentioned the drug on the campaign trail as evidence of what he considers a failed response to the virus, which prompted him to run for Senate.

The Trump administration’s pressure on the FDA was also widely publicized in 2020. But the report from the panel, chaired by U.S. Rep. Jim Clyburn, a South Carolina Democrat, goes into far greater detail, describing a White House push to investigate agency commissioner Stephen Hahn and Anthony Fauci, the infectious-disease chief for the National Institutes of Health. (Republicans renewed calls to investigate Fauci when he announced this month that he would step down in December).

The FDA authorized hydroxychloroquine for emergency use on March 28, 2020, six days after Oz’s first email to the White House — only to revoke that authorization less than three months later, citing a lack of evidence that it worked and a slight risk of side effects, such as an irregular heart rhythm. Yet through the summer and early fall, senior Trump administration officials pushed agency officials to reauthorize the drug, emails and records show.

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Oz frequently spoke favorably of the drug on his TV program and in interviews in 2020. He purchased thousands of dollars of the drug to conduct a clinical trial that never advanced, something he has blamed on then-New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who prohibited clinical trials of the drug, along with its prescription.

At a March campaign event in West Chester, Oz talked about how promising hydroxychloroquine was. He called the drug’s rejection by the FDA part of a larger overzealous authoritarian response to COVID-19.

“President Trump mentioned it. It was dead in the water,” Oz said of the drug at the event in March. “The media hated him so much that they didn’t want this to work. They rooted against hydroxychloroquine.” Oz added, incorrectly: “Even today, two years later, we don’t know if it works. It’s never been allowed to be studied.”

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Oz has been criticized in the past for offering misleading or sometimes untrue medical advice on his popular television program, The Dr. Oz Show. At a “Real Doctors Against Oz” event organized by Lt. Gov. John Fetterman’s Senate campaign earlier this month, physicians who are supporting Fetterman criticized Oz for advocating for hydroxychloroquine.

Oz has frequently said on the campaign trail that he thinks the government response to COVID-19 unjustly limited personal freedoms and in some cases was an overblown response to the severity of the virus.

“What happened in the government’s reaction to COVID was a top-down authoritarian approach that did not tolerate any dissent,” Oz said in March. “And it failed miserably.”