Herman Cain, co-chair of Black Voices for Trump, was working to re-elect the president when the Wuhan coronavirus prematurely took his life. Cain was hospitalized with the virus on July 1 and spent four weeks there until his death on July 30.
He was indispensable both as a conservative and as a brave man. He spoke out against political interference in hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) as an effective preventive and early treatment for Covid-19. Despite tweets from the hospital, there is no indication he received favorable treatment in a timely manner.
Instead, his millions of supporters were told he would survive with treatment that included taking oxygen. The liberal approach of hospitalization and then treatment without early employ of HCQ proved ineffective for many Covid-19 patients, and hospitalization almost resulted in the death of the energetic Prime Minister Boris Johnson in England.
Cain was in good condition and traveled frequently before he was hospitalized with breathing difficulties. He was not obese, and he overcame cancer almost 15 years ago, which he talked about in passionate speeches to many audiences.
Throughout his political career, Cain has been a fierce target of the left, like many black conservatives. He ran for president in 2012, and the liberal media pursued him harder than any other candidate.
At just 74, he was younger than Democratic candidate Joe Biden, who would undoubtedly have received the necessary early treatment to defeat Covid-19 if he ever contracted it. Biden will not waste weeks in hospital like Boris Johnson and Herman Cain, and Cain died tragically.
Georgia continues to interfere with the employ of HCQ in the treatment of Wuhan virus victims by enforcing unprecedented measures laws written specifically to block access to this drug. Liberal bureaucrats in Georgia imposed an emergency order banning Herman Cain and others from accessing HCQ unless the prescription states a diagnosis “consistent with the evidence for its use.”
According to opponents of Donald Trump (and Herman Cain), this regulation prevents prescriptions for HCQ for the treatment of Covid-19 from being filled in Georgia. But was Cain exposed to Covid-19 in any of these cases dozens of other countries that allow access to HCQhe could have received this vaccine early in the disease and still be with us.
Just 2,600 miles south of Atlanta, where Cain died in hospital, is Costa Rica, where the Covid-19 death rate remains just one-fifteenth the rate per million in the United States. In Costa Rica, free from Trump’s interference in access to unthreatening medicines, HCQ is widely available for prevention and early care of the disease.
Hospitals in the United States are much better funded than those in Costa Rica, but the drugs cost less than a dollar a pill and appear to be more effective than ventilators and ICUs. Impoverished countries that don’t even have running water in their hospitals are coping with the Wuhan virus better than the politicized health care system in the United States.
Last Wednesday, liberal regulators in Ohio took the unprecedented step of completely banning the employ of HCQ to treat COVID-19, except in very narrow cases of clinical trials, many of which have also been shut down or delayed. Perhaps someone who had never been Trump in Ohio thought it was a astute move to perpetuate the crisis and defeat Donald Trump, but even timid Republican Gov. Mike DeWine saw it as overkill.
The next day, Governor DeWine “asked” the Ohio Board of Pharmacy to lift the HCQ ban, a ban that runs counter to all customary rules allowing physicians to prescribe approved drugs for off-label uses. Perplexed Ohio regulators have withdrawn their ban, but uncertainty remains as they plan to investigate the issue further.
Meanwhile, Yale School of Public Health epidemiology Professor Harvey Risch stated on national television that “between 75,000 and 100,000 lives will be saved” if HCQ is made available. Although Yale is not a conservative institution, Yale professor Risch candidly noted that “we are essentially fighting a propaganda war against medical facts.”
Not so long ago, hospitals were built and run on moral principles, often based on religious affiliation. Much of this is no longer the case, and most hospitals are dominated by profit, politics, and a utilitarian ethic that, in the face of political bias, focuses as much on the bottom line rather than saving lives at all costs.
Hospitals that received HCQ from the Strategic National Stockpile did not even employ the drug previously on patients immediately after admission for Covid-19. Most hospitals and state governments have returned unused drugs to landfills, where more than 50 million doses are destroyed and ultimately thrown away, and thousands of Americans die without access to the medicine.
John and Andy Schlafly are the sons of Phyllis Schlafly (1924–2016) and run the continuing Phyllis Schlafly Eagles writing and policy work.
