Given a paragraph, generate a claim that is supported by the given paragraph. 1) The claim must contain information from within the paragraph. 2) A sentence within the paragraph can be used as a claim. 3) The claim should not have contradictions within the paragraph. 4) The claim should be at most one sentence long.

Q: While governments in at least 20 other states obtained more than 30 million doses of the drug through donations from the federal reserve or private companies, Oklahoma and Utah instead bought them from private pharmaceutical companies. Top officials in both states chalked up the decisions to “the fog of war.”  Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt on Tuesday defended the state’s $2 million purchase, saying the drug was showing some promise. His health secretary attributed buying the 1.2 million hydroxychloroquine pills to something that happens in the “fog of war.”  Utah Gov. Gary Herbert at first defended the state’s $800,000 purchase of 20,000 packets of hydroxychloroquine compounded with zinc, but has since ordered an investigation of a no-bid contract with a local company that had been promoting the drugs. Herbert, a Republican, also canceled an additional plan to spend $8 million more to buy 200,000 additional treatments from the same company. A left-leaning nonprofit group in Utah filed a price gouging complaint Tuesday with state regulators, arguing the $40 per pack drug was grossly overpriced. Oklahoma’s attorney general requested an investigative audit on Tuesday of its Department of Health over spending and warned the agency about retaliating against employees who report wrongful government activities under the state’s Whistleblower Act. A spokesman for Attorney General Mike Hunter declined to comment on whether the request was related to the $2 million spent on the drug. Doctors can already prescribe the malaria drug to patients with COVID-19, a practice known as off-label prescribing, and many do. But the U.S. Food and Drug Administration on Friday warned doctors against prescribing hydroxychloroquine for treating the coronavirus outside of hospitals or research settings because of reports of serious side effects, including irregular heart rhythms and death among patients. Preliminary results from a recent study done on coronavirus patients at U.S. veterans hospitals showed no benefit, casting more doubt on the drug’s efficacy during the pandemic. Those were the latest admonitions against the drug that Trump has regularly promoted in public appearances, touting its potential despite his own health advisors telling him it is unproven. Oklahoma acquired 1.2 million pills, or about 100,000 doses, on April 4 from FFF Enterprises, a California-based medical supply wholesaler, according to the Oklahoma State Department of Health. Oklahoma state Rep. Melissa Provenzano, a Democrat from Tulsa, said the state’s purchase shows that Gov. Stitt’s actions don’t follow his claim that he relies on data to drive his decisions. “Two million dollars is a lot of money to waste, especially when we have unemployment claims approved yet going unpaid, health care professionals without proper protective equipment, and diagnosed cases and deaths continuing to rise,” Provenzano said. Stitt, a first-term Republican, said hydroxychloroquine was showing some promise as a treatment in early March, and he didn’t want Oklahoma to miss out on an opportunity to acquire it. “Now there’s some evidence the chloroquine may not be as effective, but I was being proactive to try and protect Oklahomans,” Stitt said Tuesday when asked about the purchase. “That’s always going to be my first instinct, to get the equipment and things we need that I’m seeing in the future would help Oklahomans.” Oklahoma’s Secretary of Health Jerome Loughridge said several physicians, including some in Oklahoma, were previously optimistic about the drug’s promise in treating COVID-19. He added that the drug is also useful for treating lupus and some other auto-immune diseases, so the state’s supply “will not have gone to waste.” “When we were battling sort of the fog of war at that point, we certainly acquired it on the potential that it would have utility,” Loughridge said. Jeff Burton, a former adjutant general of the Utah National Guard chosen to lead the state health department’s coronavirus task force, offered a similar explanation for why the state made its purchase. He said the state never received the pills and is trying to get its money back. “I chalk it up to fog of war,” Burton told the state’s pharmacy board. “There was a lot going on. It’s easy to judge it from (an) easy chair.. . . Since then we’ve decided that was not a wise purchase.”  Doctors in Oklahoma have been using the drug to treat patients with COVID-19, often in conjunction with a second drug, azithromiocin, but the results “just are not that promising,” said Dr. Douglas Drevets, chief of infectious diseases at University of Oklahoma Medicine. FFF Enterprises said it’s the company’s policy not to comment on transactions with customers. Utah gave a local company called Meds in Motion the $800,000 contract without taking bids from other companies under emergency procurement rules, said Christopher Hughes, director of Utah’s division of purchasing. State officials haven’t explained why they didn’t seek to get the drugs for free. The Federal Emergency Management Agency said Saturday it has sent out 28.6 million tablets of hydroxychloroquine sulfate free of cost to states around the country. Several states including New York, Connecticut and Texas received donations of the medication from a private company based in New Jersey called Amneal Pharmaceutical, according to information compiled by The Associated Press. Utah taxpayers deserve to know what happened to allow a purchase that seems like a company taking advantage of the early, chaotic days of the pandemic, said Chase Thomas, executive director of the group called Alliance for a Better Utah that submitted the price gouging complaint. The complaint alleges Utah paid at least double the common price for the medication. “Whether they were buying drugs we didn’t need or paying too much for it when they could have gotten them for free, there just needed to be a lot more thought going into this,” Thomas said. Meds in Motion didn’t answer an email seeking comment about the allegations. Herbert declined to provide an update Tuesday about the investigation of the purchase. He said Friday the state’s legal counsel would aim to find out what, how and why it happened. He said he believed state officials acted in good faith as they scrambled to slow the spread of coronavirus, but acknowledged a mistake may have been made. “I have some questions about how it came about,” Herbert said Friday. “Bottom line is, we’re not purchasing any more of this drug.”  ___ McCombs and Whitehurst reported from Salt Lake City.

A: Oklahoma, Utah face scrutiny over malaria drug purchases.
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Q: Amid warnings from public health officials that a 2020 outbreak of a new coronavirus could soon become a pandemic involving the U.S., alarmed readers asked Snopes to verify a rumor that U.S. President Donald Trump had “fired the entire pandemic response team two years ago and then didn’t replace them.” The claim came from a series of tweets posted by Judd Legum, who runs Popular Information, a newsletter he describes as being about “politics and power.” Legum’s commentary was representative of sharp criticism from Democratic legislators (and some Republicans) that the Trump administration had ill-prepared the country for a pandemic even as one was looming on the horizon. Legum outlined a series of cost-cutting decisions made by the Trump administration in preceding years that had gutted the nation’s infectious disease defense infrastructure. The “pandemic response team” firing claim referred to news accounts from Spring 2018 reporting that White House officials tasked with directing a national response to a pandemic had been ousted. Rear Adm. Timothy Ziemer abruptly departed from his post leading the global health security team on the National Security Council in May 2018 amid a reorganization of the council by then-National Security Advisor John Bolton, and Ziemer’s team was disbanded. Tom Bossert, whom the Washington Post reported “had called for a comprehensive biodefense strategy against pandemics and biological attacks,” had been fired one month prior. It’s thus true that the Trump administration axed the executive branch team responsible for coordinating a response to a pandemic and did not replace it, eliminating Ziemer’s position and reassigning others, although Bolton was the executive at the top of the National Security Council chain of command at the time. Legum stated in a follow-up tweet that “Trump also cut funding for the CDC, forcing the CDC to cancel its efforts to help countries prevent infectious-disease threats from becoming epidemics in 39 of 49 countries in 2018. Among the countries abandoned? China.” That was partly true, according to 2018 news reports stating that funding for the CDC’s global disease outbreak prevention efforts had been reduced by 80%, including funding for the agency’s efforts in China. But that was the result of the anticipated depletion of previously allotted funding, not a direct cut by the Trump administration. And as the CDC told FactCheck.org, the cuts were ultimately avoided because Congress provided other funding.

A: The Trump administration fired the U.S. pandemic response team in 2018 to cut costs.
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Q: Although this trial was a preliminary experiment, the proposed intervention is clearly defined as two office visits and two telephone calls with a nurse, so it should have been possible to estimate the cost. Since one purpose of testing this sort of brief intervention is to offer lower-cost alternatives to established behavioral treatment for insomnia, readers should have been given some estimate of the relative costs of the interventions. The story tells readers that 55 percent of people in the active intervention group no longer met the criteria for insomnia after four weeks. However, readers are not told how the researchers defined insomnia. Was it a complete inability to sleep? How frequently did the participants have trouble sleeping? How much more did they sleep after treatment? Without these and other details, it is difficult to get a feel for what effect the treatment had. While this story reported how many people needed to be treated in order to make a difference for at least one… a statistic we encourage journalists to use more… the story reported twice as many people benefited as the researchers actually said they saw. The researchers wrote that one person either had remission (no more insomnia) or response (significantly less insomnia) for every 2.4 people treated. But the story says that for every 2.4 participants treated one responded and one overcame insomnia. We won’t hold this story to this criterion because neither the journal article on the test nor an accompanying commentary noted any adverse events. However, the story could have pointed out that a trial this small generally would miss all but the most common problems. Also, the story could have pointed out that until further evidence is developed, it is not know for certain how this type of intervention compares with alternatives. If it turns out that for some people this treatment is less effective than alternatives, then prescribing it would mean leaving them at greater risk of being harmed by insomnia. The story gives a brief description of the experiment and some of the main outcomes that the researchers measured. The story would have been better if it told readers more about the limitations of this small trial, including what sort of further testing would be needed to determine if the intervention would work for people in the general population, rather than just those who match the profiles of the individuals who volunteered to participate in this test. The story compared this brief intervention to more established behavioral therapy, without noting the pitfalls of trying to compare results from different trials. The story did not tell readers that there is ongoing debate about the best way to measure the results of insomnia studies. The story provides estimates of how many people complain of insomnia. It also portrays this intervention as an alternative to existing treatments, rather than an effort to expand treatment to more people. The story includes comments from the author of a commentary article that appeared in the Archives of Internal Medicine along with the research article. In the disclosure section of their article, some of the researchers reported ties to pharmaceutical companies, but since this trial tested a non-drug approach and was funded by public agency and academic grants, it seems reasonable to consider the industry links as not being relevant to this study. We will credit this story for discussing the alternatives of sleeping pills and cognitive behavioral therapy. Although there was no reference to other less-intense non-drug approaches that clinicians may recommend for dealing with insomnia, there was a comment at the end of the story that offered some basic advice that readers could use on their own. The story says this form of “brief behavioral treatment for insomnia is not yet generally available”. It also described this study as being a first step in the process of making such an intervention available without making predictions about a timetable. This story suggests that there are no brief behavioral interventions available to people with insomnia. They story should not have suggested that the only alternative treatments are drugs and expensive cognitive behavioral therapy. The story does not appear to rely on a news release.

A:
Short-term pill-free therapy may help insomniacs
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