Updated at 2:40 a.m EST
US President Donald Trump revealed Monday that he had been taking for the past 10 days – as a preventative measure – the anti-malarial drug, Hydroxychloroquine, which has divided the medical community about its efficacy in fighting the emerging coronavirus, and renewed his criticism of the World Health Organization’s handling of the pandemic.
Trump added that he had no Covid-19, and he had no symptoms of the disease, and he told reporters at the White House, “I have been taking it for about a week and a half, I am taking a pill every day. At some point I will stop taking this medicine.”
The US and Canadian health authorities warned at the end of last April about the danger of using hydroxychloroquine to prevent infection with the emerging coronavirus or to treat people with this virus, if it was not used as part of controlled clinical trials.
But the US President told reporters that taking this hydroxychloroquine “will not cause harm”, stressing that this drug “has been used for forty years (…) by many doctors taking it.”
Chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine are drugs that have been used for many years to treat malaria and some autoimmune diseases, such as lupus and rheumatoid arthritis.
A study published about ten days ago in the New England Journal of Medicine showed that taking hydroxychloroquine did not lead to any significant improvement or significant deterioration in the condition of Covid-19 patients with serious symptoms.
Trump and “World Health”
Concerning the World Health Organization, Trump said Monday that he will issue a statement about the World Health Organization in the near future, adding that its approach to the Corona virus was “very unfortunate.”
Trump said during a White House event that he would make a decision about US funding for the World Health Organization soon, and that he was considering cutting it to forty million dollars, but some felt it was too much.
The American Fox News Channel revealed that the Trump administration will resume part of the funding for the World Health Organization, and said it had received a five-page message, stating that the Trump administration will provide the World Health Organization with as much money as China pays in certain areas.
When Trump was asked why he had not given a speech to a hypothetical WHO ministerial meeting earlier yesterday, he answered, “I chose not to make a statement. I will make a statement for them sometime in the near future, but (…) I think they did a very unfortunate job in the last period”.
Trump renewed his demand to end the country’s general closure, which was imposed as part of attempts to curb the outbreak of the Corona virus, and said in a tweet on Twitter, “Reopen our country.”
The United States recorded more than a million and a half million cases of corona, of whom 91,000 died.
As of Monday evening, the number of people infected with corona in the world exceeded 4 million and 837 thousand, of whom nearly 317 thousand died, and more than one million and 872 thousand have recovered, according to the website “World Meter”, which specializes in monitoring the victims of the virus
Facebook
has appointed Emi Palmor, the former Israeli Justice Ministry
director-general, to its Oversight Board which will be tasked with content
moderation on Facebook and Instagram.
The Oversight Board, first announced by Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg in November 2018 following the 2016 U.S. presidential elections, is expected respond to growing criticism regarding a lack of transparency and consistency in the platform’s decision-making processes regarding freedom of expression.
The move is likely to cause concern among pro-Palestine activists who already feel that the social media giant is censoring them.
Palmor, who is a lecturer in the Israeli Defense Forces, is one of 20 members selected from around the world from a wide range of professional and cultural backgrounds to be appointed to the independent board.
Their recruitment was led by Facebook, with the co-chairs then leading the selection of the rest of the members which include Nobel Peace Prize laureate and Yemeni activist Tawakkol Karman and former Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger.
The Oversight Board will review content that both by users and Facebook refer to it. All decisions will be posted on the board’s website and Facebook will be required to respond publicly to them.
The board will also publish an annual report evaluating its work and the extent to which Facebook is meeting its commitments.
“I have been a civil servant for 24 years in Israel, dedicating my life to increasing access to justice and putting the citizen at the centre,” said Palmor. “For me, serving on the Oversight Board is an opportunity to do this for people around the world. I have a reputation for not being afraid of difficult issues and am dedicated to holding Facebook accountable by improving how content decisions are made and increasing the fairness and transparency around why they are made.”
Facebook has previously confirmed that the board will be funded by a $130 million trust, established by Facebook but which the board says is independent of the social network.
Mr Rusbridger said it had taken too long to create such a system for moderating content, but was pleased such a body was now in place.
“We are living in a world of information chaos and standing on the precipice of darkness,” he said. “Societies can’t function unless their citizens can agree on what constitutes evidence, fact and truth.
“It’s perhaps taken us too long to realize this. The Oversight Board seems to be the first imaginative and bold step by one of the biggest players to find a way of reconciling the need to start imposing some kind of judgment and standards on what is published, while still maintaining the things that are wonderful about social media, and necessary for free speech.”