(This op-ed was first published in Newsweek on May 24, 2020.)

A terrible contagion was ravaging the capital city, carried there by refugees from a foreign land. Residents were dying every day, with a body count that would eventually reach almost 10 percent of the city’s population. Amidst the outbreak, one of the nation’s most divisive figures caught the disease. This was a man suspected by his political opponents of anti-democratic tendencies and of favoring economic growth over genuine American values. He and his wife, who also caught it, self-quarantined and separated from their children and friends. But rather than submit to the regimen recommended by the nation’s leading medical expert—namely bloodletting, induced vomiting and frequent enemas—this political lightning rod turned to an experimental drug, quinine, supplemented by Portuguese wine and cinnamon. In a case of the spoonful of sugar proving the better medicine, the couple got well in just five days.

(Continue reading the op-ed on Newsweek’s page here.)

Michael McConnell is professor of law and director of the Constitutional Law Center at Stanford Law School and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. Max Raskin is an adjunct professor of law at New York University and a trustee of the Tel Aviv University Sackler School of Medicine.