The Idiotic Fight over Hydroxychloroquine

Pandemics call for a willingness to break medicine out of the usual red-tape mentality and accept some risks in combating a fast-moving, deadly virus. In that spirit, there was nothing wrong in theory with President Trump’s willingness to push the health-care system to consider hydroxychloroquine, although at his briefings he often sounded like a salesman desperate to make his quarterly quota.

Hydroxychloroquine, an anti-malarial drug, is a well-established medicine for other purposes, and its potential has been worth exploring. Some promising early results led Democratic governors such as Andrew Cuomo...