President calls negative hydroxychloroquine study 'a Trump enemy statement' – as it happened

Live reporting on the coronavirus in the US continues on Wednesday’s blog:

• Donald Trump signed an executive order encouraging agencies to rollback regulations. “Agencies must continue to remove barriers to the greatest engine of economic prosperity the world has ever known: the innovation, initiative, and drive of the American people,” the order states.
• The Senate confirmed a Trump appointee to the Federal Elections Committee, giving the agency the four votes needed to regulate federal election campaign finance laws. Trey Trainor, the conservative Texas lawyer who as confirmed to the seat has pushed for less regulation of money in politics.
• Member states backed the WHO after another attack from Trump, calling for a global show of support. A resolution that backed the WHO’s leadership and said there would be an investigation into the global response to the pandemic, but did not endorse a major overhaul, as Trump requested.
• The president criticized a negative hydroxychloroquine study as a “Trump enemy statement”. A preliminary study of coronavirus patients at US veterans health administration medical centers found that showed those treated with the anti-malaria drug, which Trump has repeatedly promoted, had a higher risk of death.
• The US vice-president, Mike Pence, said he is not taking hydroxychloroquine. Pence’s admission came one day after Trump told reporters he has been taking the drug in recent days, despite the Food and Drug Administration’s guidance that it should only be used in hospital settings.
• Trump lashed out against Nancy Pelosi after the House speaker described the president as “morbidly obese”. Pelosi said she did not think Trump should be taking hydroxychloroquine, particularly considering his age and weight. “Pelosi is a sick woman,” Trump said in response. “She’s got a lot of problems, a lot of mental problems.”
• The treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, and the Fed chairman, Jerome Powell, virtually testified before the Senate banking committee. Mnuchin warned that an extended shutdown could potentially cause “permanent damage” to the US economy, while Powell suggested Congress may need to approve additional relief funding.
• New York’s governor, Andrew Cuomo, issued some thinly veiled criticism of Trump. “You’re not going to tweet your way through this,” Cuomo said during his daily briefing.

Patrick Wintour and Julian Borger report:

Member states have backed a resolution strongly supportive of the World Health Organization, after Donald Trump issued a fresh broadside against the UN body, giving it 30 days to make unspecified reforms or lose out on US funding.

A resolution that backed the WHO’s leadership and said there needed to be an investigation into the global response to the coronavirus pandemic won endorsement at the WHO’s annual ministerial meeting on Tuesday.

The US president launched his attack late on Monday, sending a lengthy letter outlining America’s belief that the WHO had not been sufficiently independent of China, and had been too willing to accept its explanations for the origins of the coronavirus outbreak.

As the pandemic worsens in the US, and other countries begin a tentative recovery, Trump has sought to blame China and the WHO. The letter accused the WHO of making repeated mistakes, meaning thousands of lives had been lost, and America’s interests not served.

“If the WHO does not commit to major substantive improvements within the next 30 days, I will make my temporary freeze of United States funding to the WHO permanent and reconsider our membership,” Trump told its chief, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.

His attack was timed to coincide with the start of the two-day World Health Assembly, which on Tuesday finally backed a draft resolution that supported a WHO-established independent and impartial inquiry into the WHO’s conduct over the coronavirus.

The resolution, supported by China’s president, Xi Jinping, on Monday and largely drafted by the European Union, stops short of the kind of international inquiry focused on China’s conduct that was first canvassed by Australia and the US. The Chinese foreign ministry claimed the resolution was completely different from the politically motivated inquiry sought by Australia.

The Senate has confirmed Trey Trainor, a conservative Texas attorney, to the Federal Elections Committee.

Trainor, an election law attorney, has pushed for less regulation of money in politics. He advised the Republican National Committee and Donald Trump’s campaign during the 2016 election.

The confirmation ends longest period in the agency’s history without a quorum. The committee will now have the four votes needed to regulate federal campaign finance laws.

20 May 202019.08 EDT

Oliver Milman

Who is Sean Conley, the doctor gave Donald Trump hydoxychloroquine?

Conley is US navy veteran and is qualified in osteopathic medicine.

Conley, who is from Pennsylvania, graduated from the Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine in 2006 and went on to undertake a medical residency at a navy base in Virginia. He was then deployed to Afghanistan, where he acted as head of a trauma unit at a Nato base.

The medical unit at the White House is typically staffed by doctors drawn from the US military and Conley found himself in line to become the president’s own physician after the departure of Ronny Jackson, who had previously raised eyebrows by praising Trump’s “good genes” and for saying that if the president had had “a healthier diet over the last 20 years, he might live to be 200 years old”.

Jackson had also sparked a short-lived “girther” conspiracy movement after reporting Trump’s weight as 239lb, just 1lb below a threshold that would class the president as obese. Trump sleeps just four or five hours a night, doesn’t exercise outside rounds of golf and is fond of McDonald’s but is fit enough for a second term, Jackson reported in 2018.

Listen: The Guardian’s Julia Carrie Wong explains that before reaching Trump, the hype around hydroxychloroquine, which is also used to treat rheumatoid arthritis and lupus, had moved from small clinical studies through to influencers in Silicon Valley and then on to prime time shows on Fox News.

But rather than being 100% effective as has been claimed, there are serious doubts about the drug’s safety when taken to treat coronavirus.

On Monday, thousands of visitors from across the country descended on Yellowstone national park, which opened for the first time since its closure in March due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Sam Gilbert reports for the Guardian:

“We have been cooped up for weeks,” Jacob Willis told the Guardian near a crowd of onlookers at the Old Faithful Geyser. “When the parks opened, we jumped at the opportunity to travel,” said Willis, who had arrived from Florida.

Yellowstone, America’s oldest national park, and the nearby Grand Teton national park are the most recent to have partially reopened with the support of the Trump administration.

“I hope everybody is listening,” Donald Trump announced earlier in May. “The parks are opening, and rapidly, actually.”

While many have celebrated the reopening of the revered landscapes, others have raised health concerns about large, possibly maskless, groups of out-of-state visitors arriving and potentially skirting social distancing guidelines.

Republicans are recruiting doctors to promote Trump’s plan to reopen the economy quickly, the AP reports:

Republican political operatives are recruiting “pro-Trump” doctors to go on television to prescribe reviving the U.S. economy as quickly as possible, without waiting to meet safety benchmarks proposed by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to slow the spread of the new coronavirus.

The plan was discussed in a May 11 conference call with a senior staffer for the Trump reelection campaign organized by CNP Action, an affiliate of the GOP-aligned Council for National Policy. A leaked recording of the hour-long call was provided to The Associated Press by the Center for Media and Democracy, a progressive watchdog group.CNP Action is part of the Save Our Country Coalition, an alliance of conservative think tanks and political committees formed in late April to end state lockdowns implemented in response to the pandemic. Other members of the coalition include the FreedomWorks Foundation, the American Legislative Exchange Council and Tea Party Patriots.

Tim Murtaugh, the Trump campaign communications director, confirmed to AP that an effort to recruit doctors to publicly support the president is underway, but declined to say when the initiative would be rolled out.

“Anybody who joins one of our coalitions is vetted,” Murtaugh said Monday. “And so quite obviously, all of our coalitions espouse policies and say things that are, of course, exactly simpatico with what the president believes. ... The president has been outspoken about the fact that he wants to get the country back open as soon as possible.”

Environmental groups are none too pleased.

“Trump’s latest order makes about as much sense as drinking bleach,” said Brett Hartl, the government affairs director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “He’s using the pandemic to slash life-saving protections for our air, water, and wildlife when these safeguards have never been more important. It’s astounding that Trump is so out of touch with the majority of people who understand that there can’t be economic recovery on a dying planet.”

Trump has signed an executive order encouraging agencies to cut regulations in the name of economic recovery.

“Agencies must continue to remove barriers to the greatest engine of economic prosperity the world has ever known: the innovation, initiative, and drive of the American people,” the order states.