Conservatives are celebrating a … journal retraction?

President Trump’s allies and his defenders in the media can’t stop talking about the recent retraction of a study published in the Lancet that had raised concerns about the safety of hydroxychloroquine. It’s huge news that, paired with a related retraction in the New England Journal of Medicine, has embarrassed two of the world’s top journals. It’s igniting a debate over the process of peer review, and has cost one of the authors their professorship. But conservatives can’t stop talking about it because they argue it proves that the scientific world was too quick to disbelieve President Trump’s famous claims that the drug might help treat Covid-19.

“In an attempt to sharpshoot Trump’s most famous scientific claim, one of the world’s leading medical journals just blew off its own foot,” the National Review wrote.

They’re using the news, too, to renew their criticisms of the nation’s top vaccine expert, Tony Fauci.

Fox News’ Laura Ingraham, in a six-minute segment railing on the retraction, noted that Fauci had “declared the drug a lost cause.” “Where are the mea culpas from Dr. Fauci?” she asked, prompting her guest, Ramin Oskoui, CEO of Foxhall Cardiology, to declare that Fauci is “more politician than physician.”

Worth noting: a new study, the first double-blind randomized, placebo-controlled trial of hydroxychloroquine, found that the drug did not help prevent people who had been exposed to others with Covid-19 from developing the disease. Another major new trial from the U.K. showed that the drug had no benefit for patients hospitalized with Covid-19.