Herman Cain, co-chair of Black Voices for Trump, was working to reelect the president when his life was prematurely taken from him by the Wuhan coronavirus. Cain was hospitalized with the virus on July 1 and languished there for four weeks until passing away on July 30.
He was essential both as a conservative and as a courageous human being. He spoke out against political interference with hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) as an effective preventive and early medication for COVID-19. Despite tweets from the hospital, there is no indication that he received the beneficial treatment in a timely manner.
Instead, his millions of supporters were told that he would make it through with a course of treatment that included receiving oxygen. The liberal approach of hospitalizing first, and then treating without early use of HCQ, has been unsuccessful for many COVID-19 patients, and hospitalization nearly resulted in death for the vigorous prime minister Boris Johnson in England.
Cain was fit and traveling frequently before he was hospitalized with breathing difficulties. He was not obese and he had conquered cancer nearly 15 years ago, which he recounted in riveting talks to many audiences.
Throughout his political career, Cain was viciously targeted by the Left as many black conservatives are. He ran for president in 2012 and the liberal media went after him harder than any other candidate.
At only age 74, he was younger than Democratic nominee Joe Biden, who undoubtedly would receive essential early treatment to overcome COVID-19 if he were ever to contract it. Biden would not languish in a hospital for weeks as Boris Johnson and Herman Cain did, with Cain tragically succumbing.
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Georgia continues to interfere with the use of HCQ to treat victims of the Wuhan virus by enforcing unprecedented regulations written especially to block access to this medication. Liberal bureaucrats in Georgia imposed an emergency regulation to prohibit access to HCQ for Herman Cain and others unless the prescription has a diagnosis “consistent with the evidence for its use.”
According to opponents of Donald Trump (and Herman Cain), that regulation prevents a prescription for HCQ from ever being filled to treat COVID in Georgia. Yet had Cain been exposed to COVID in any one of the dozens of foreign countries which allow access to HCQ, he could have received it early in the course of the disease and still be with us today.
Merely 1,600 miles south of Atlanta where Cain died in a hospital is Costa Rica, which has held its mortality rate from COVID to only one-fifteenth the rate per million in the United States. In Costa Rica, free of the anti-Trump interference with access to safe medication, HCQ is widely available for preventive and early care for the disease.
The hospitals in the United States are far better funded than the hospitals in Costa Rica, but it is medication that costs less than a dollar a pill, which seems more effective than ventilators and ICUs. Impoverished countries which do not even have running water in their hospitals are overcoming the Wuhan virus better than the politicized health care in the United States.
Last Wednesday, liberal regulators in Ohio took the unprecedented step of completely banning the use 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 a Never-Trumper in Ohio thought this was a clever step forward to perpetuate this crisis and defeat Donald Trump, but even its timid Republican Gov. Mike DeWine found that over-the-top.
The following day Gov. DeWine “asked” the Ohio Board of Pharmacy to reverse its ban on HCQ, a ban that was contrary to all customary rules allowing physicians to prescribe approved medication for off-label uses. Embarrassed, the Ohio regulators did withdraw their ban, but uncertainty remains as they plan to study the issue further.
Meanwhile, Yale School of Public Health epidemiology Professor Harvey Risch stated on national television that “75,000 to 100,000 lives will be saved” if HCQ were made available. Though Yale is far from a conservative institution, Yale Professor Risch candidly observed that “we’re basically fighting a propaganda war against the medical facts.”
There was a time not long ago when hospitals were built and run on moral principles, often with religious affiliation. Much of that is gone now, with profits, politics, and utilitarian ethics dominant at most hospitals, which focus as much on the bottom line amid political bias than on saving lives at any cost.
Hospitals which received HCQ from the Strategic National Stockpile have not even used the medication early for patients immediately upon admission for COVID-19. Most hospitals and state governments have returned the medication unused to the Stockpile, where more than 50 million doses deteriorate to eventually be thrown out while thousands of Americans die without access to it.
John and Andy Schlafly are sons of Phyllis Schlafly (1924-2016) and lead the continuing Phyllis Schlafly Eagles organizations with writing and policy work.
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