When the pandemic hit American soil, the country faced a tragic lack of leadership in President Donald Trump, a man who famously did not bother to read his daily briefs. He also spent a lot of time on Twitter, and not only religiously watched Fox News but took policy cues from it. In the emerging crisis — which happened to coincide with Trump’s reelection campaign gearing up — while scientific experts couldn’t get the ear of the president, social media and right-wing media very much could and did.

Trump, who had promised the pandemic would simply disappear, came to embrace a too-good-to-be-true pandemic “solution” in the form of hydroxychloroquine (HCQ), which had captured the excitement of Silicon Valley — and the attention of Elon Musk on Twitter. Though the repurposing of existing drugs is not inherently a bad idea, Team Trump was not interested in engaging in the scientific process to test for safety and efficacy. And it certainly wasn’t the only time Musk or Trump recklessly took off with an idea because they wanted it to be true.

Encouraged by dubious sources, MAGA jumped all-in on the early promise of HCQ, which would quickly prove ineffective against the virus. In so doing, they would cause a devastating shortage of the medication for those, such as lupus patients, who actually needed it; a scramble for data and shoddy studies to back up a big and empty promise; a lucrative telehealth grift for physicians who took a free ride on the hype; and a chaotic and deadly political war on science and vaccines.