Cut off your nose, spite your face

President Trump has credited the apparent improvement of his coronavirus infection to, as he put it in one tweet, "some really great drugs" that were "developed, under the Trump Administration."

[...]

For years [Peter] Daszak led a U.S.-funded project that played an important role in the emergence of one of those drugs — remdesivir — as a promising treatment for COVID-19. Specifically, Daszak's U.S.-based research group, EcoHealth Alliance, collaborated with scientists in China to collect fluid samples from bats there in search of coronaviruses that could pose a threat if they spilled over into humans.

Beginning in 2014, virus experts in the U.S. tested remdesivir against some of the bat strains that EcoHealth Alliance had discovered. The results were promising.

[...]

Yet in April the National Institutes of Health abruptly terminated funding for the China bat research project with no clear explanation. In the weeks earlier, Trump administration officials had been pushing a largely discredited theory that the Chinese lab that EcoHealth Alliance was partnered with – the Wuhan Institute of Virology – had accidentally released the virus causing COVID-19. And at a White House press conference days before the funding was pulled, Trump erroneously implied that the entirety of the money had gone to the Wuhan Institute and promised that his administration would take action on the issue.

After an uproar among scientists — including 77 Nobel laureates who sent a letter in protest — the National Institutes of Health said it would reinstate the grant in July. But officials have imposed conditions that Daszak says are unprecedented and purposefully impossible to meet.

[...]

" [The president] is not trying to undermine our organization specifically. He just wants to create a narrative that's anti-China." But he adds a little wistfully, "If collaborating with China on this work led to a drug that might help save his life, maybe that will turn him around and make him realize that this research is the sort of thing we need to be doing."

  NPR

I very much doubt it. Trump is the kind of guy who cuts off his nose to spite his face..

Another researcher who shares that hope is Mark Denison, a professor at Vanderbilt University who specializes in studying coronaviruses. Denison notes that the one causing the current pandemic — known as SARS-CoV-2 — is the third coronavirus to prove deadly to humans in the last 20 years, following SARS and MERS. So when it comes to the focus of his research, "I'm preparing for SARS-CoV-3."

But Denison adds that work is now hampered because EcoHealth Alliance has been effectively barred from discovering additional coronaviruses in China — which research suggests is a major reservoir for viruses that could cause future outbreaks.

And speaking of Trump's nose...is this what happens when you put decades of chemical product on your face?

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.