This weekend, Donald Trump used his daily White House coronavirus briefings to again urge Americans to take hydroxychloroquine, an anti-malaria drug that has not been shown to be safe or effective against Covid-19.
“What do you have to lose? Take it,” the president said on Saturday as he boasted that the US had amassed 29m doses of the drug. On Sunday, facing questions from the press about his aggressive promotion of an unproven treatment, he argued against waiting for the completion of clinical trials. “In France, they had a very good test,” he said. “But we don’t have time to go and say, ‘Gee, let’s take a couple of years and test it out, and let’s go and test with the test tubes and the laboratories.’”
Meanwhile, Dr Anthony Fauci, the country’s top infectious disease doctor, has repeatedly warned that there is no conclusive evidence to support using the drug. Asked whether it should be considered a treatment for Covid-19, he said on 24 March: “The answer is no.”
The story of how hydroxychloroquine was anointed the Trump administration’s miracle drug for the coronavirus pandemic is a distinctly modern tale of misinformation within a global information ecosystem beset by widespread uncertainty, fear, media fragmentation and hyper-partisanship. Belief in the drug’s potential to cure patients infected with the virus followed an extraordinary trajectory from a small study conducted in France (Trump’s “very good test”) to Silicon Valley social media influencers, Fox News and the largest bully pulpit: the White House.
But it’s also a story as old as medicine itself. When an epidemic killed thousands in ancient Rome, said Aaron Shakow, a research associate at Harvard Medical School and historian of medicine, the chief physician of the emperor Nero circulated a recipe for an old miracle cure.
“It was an attempt by Nero to sustain his legitimacy in the midst of this catastrophic event,” Shakow said. “Epidemics are dangerous to rulers.”
A deeply flawed study In early March, as the coronavirus pandemic accelerated its spread around the globe, a group of scientists in Marseille, France, launched an experiment to see whether hydroxychloroquine, a well-known old malaria drug, could be what everyone was searching for: a cure.
Most small scientific studies live and die within the rarified domain of academic journals, but the French trial had a much more auspicious debut. Before the study was even published, in the International Journal of Antimicrobial Agents (IJAA), a lawyer falsely claiming an affiliation with Stanford University appeared on Fox News’s Tucker Carlson Tonight to declare the results: a “100% cure rate against coronavirus”. From Fox News, it was only a matter of time (hours, in fact) before the drug was being hailed as a “game changer” by the president of the United States.
Trump made his first endorsement of hydroxychloroquine on 19 March. Export controls, shortages, overdoses and scientific recriminations rapidly ensued, but the controversy could not extinguish the power of presidentially endorsed hope. Across the globe and throughout diverse communities on the internet, hydroxychloroquine had been anointed the miracle cure for Covid-19.
The only problem? The study that all this fervid hope is based on doesn’t show what its authors claim it does.
The gold standard for a clinical trial is a double-blinded, randomized controlled trial (RCT). What this means in plain English is that the study has been designed to reduce biases that would render its results meaningless. Neither the physician nor the patients knows whether they received the drug (“double-blinded”), a safeguard that reduces the possibility that the doctor will treat the two groups differently. The researchers also do not get to choose which patients go into which group (“randomized”) and the makeup of the two groups is roughly equivalent (“controlled”).
The French hydroxychloroquine study did not follow any of these rules.
The treatment group and the control group were drawn from separate populations: the treatment group were all patients at the institution where the researchers worked, the Méditerranée Infection University Hospital Institute in Marseille, while the control patients came from other hospitals in the south of France. The treatment group (mean age 51.2) was significantly older than the control group (mean age 37.3), introducing another variable that could undermine the meaning of the results. The study was “open label”, meaning the physicians and patients knew which treatment they were receiving. The French researchers also treated some but not all of the treatment group patients with azithromycin, a common antibiotic, another complicating factor that was not randomized.
But even more important than these shortcomings in the design of the study is how the researchers chose to measure and report their results. Forty-two patients were initially included in the study. Three were transferred to the intensive care unit; one died, one left the hospital, and one stopped taking the treatment due to nausea. The other 36 eventually recovered, and those who received the drug cleared the virus from the system faster than those who did not.
If you had only heard about this study from the Fox News assertion of a “100% cure rate”, you might assume that the four patients with poor clinical outcomes (the three ICU visits and one death) had been unlucky enough to be in the group that did not receive the “cure”.
And yet, those four patients, as well as the patient with nausea and the one who left the hospital early, were all part of the treatment group. They were excluded from the topline results of the study because of the way that the researchers chose to measure and report the results: strictly based on the measurable presence of viruses in nasal swabs taken each day of the study. Since the patients were in the ICU or dead, their samples could not be taken and they were left out of the final analysis. Based on the nasal swabs of just the 36 patients who completed the study, those who received the drug cleared the virus from their systems faster than those who did not.
This is how an experiment in which 15% of the treatment group and 0% of the control had poor clinical outcomes could end up being reported as showing a “100% cure rate”.
On 3 April, two weeks after the study was first published online, the International Society of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy, which publishes the IJAA, said in a statement that the group’s board “believes the article does not meet the Society’s expected standard, especially relating to the lack of better explanations of the inclusion criteria and the triage of patients to ensure patient safety”.
Didier Raoult, the corresponding author for the French study, did not respond to questions from the Guardian.
Andrew Noymer, a professor of public health at the University of California, Irvine, described the results of the French study as “meaningless”. “They should have done an RCT,” he said.
“This idea that we’re all manning the lifeboats and there’s no time for that is just absurd,” Noymer added. “They could have already done it. They could have had the answer by now … Doctors have always gone with their guts and saved many lives, but I don’t know. If they had done RCTs on Thalidomide” – a drug that caused birth defects – “they would have figured out its dangers a lot sooner.”
From Silicon Valley to Fox News So how did one interesting but flawed study out of the south of France make its way to Fox News’s prime time and the White House?
It was not surprising that scientists were interested in testing hydroxychloroquine (and its close relative, chloroquine), a well-known and understood drug, as a potential treatment against Covid-19. It is one of a number of possible treatments that scientists in China and South Korea looked at in the early stages of the coronavirus outbreak, including in vitro (ie lab-based) experiments that showed promising (though not conclusive) results. The drug was also selected as one of four that the World Health Organization included in its large-scale international clinical trial.
But while hydroxychloroquine was garnering some interest in the early days of the pandemic, other possible treatments, such as Gilead’s antiviral Remdesivir, were drawing more. Google trends data shows that people were searching for Remdesivir more than hydroxychloroquine throughout most of February.
What Remdesivir lacked that hydroxychloroquine had, however, was a team of dedicated hype men who appeared more interested in publicizing the drug as a cure than they were in discovering whether the drug was effective.
Among these is Raoult, the French physician who co-authored the hydroxychloroquine study in Marseille. Before Raoult had even begun his clinical trial, in late February, he appeared in the press to promote the idea of chloroquine as a treatment, researchers with First Draft News found. A video of the appearance received more than a quarter-million views on Facebook.
Raoult also found a dedicated and effective English-language publicist in Gregory Rigano, the lawyer who appeared on Fox News with a chyron that falsely labeled him an “adviser” to Stanford medical school. Rigano wrote a Google document promoting the use of chloroquine with James Todaro, a blockchain investor who received a medical degree from Columbia University but does not appear to practice. (The document initially listed a third co-author, a retired biochemist who disclaimed any knowledge of it when contacted by Wired.)
The Google document, which was formatted in a way that made it appear to be a scientific paper, found an audience among Silicon Valley’s elite. It was shared on Twitter by a number of influential investors before it hit the virality motherlode: on 16 March, the billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk tweeted the link to the document to his nearly 33 million followers.
“When someone who is newsworthy or notable that has an enormous network on social media tweets about something that could be as path-breaking as a medicine that could treat coronavirus, everyone is going to pay attention no matter if that person has expertise or not,” said Joan Donovan, director of the technology and social change research project at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center. “Elon Musk elevating and giving voice to this Google doc does act as a validating mechanism. Elon Musk is a tech entrepreneur best known as a car salesman, but nevertheless people look to him for what’s new, what’s next.”
Musk’s tweet received more than 13,000 retweets. (He did not respond to questions from the Guardian about his promotion of the document.) Search interest in chloroquine soared. Mainstream media outlets covered his apparent endorsement of the drug. An 85-year-old medication was well on its way to becoming a Covid-19 meme.
America’s right wing piles on Once Trump declared himself a proponent of hydroxychloroquine, the scientific debate over the drug was drowned out by a decidedly partisan one.
Rightwing media outlets have followed Fox News’s lead (an analysis by Media Matters found that the cable news channel promoted using the drug 109 times between 23 and 25 March) to become staunch proponents of the drug, from digital outrage factories such as the Daily Caller and the Daily Wire to the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal.
“These drugs are helping our coronavirus patients,” declared the headline of the Journal op-ed, which was written by two physicians from Kansas, Jeff Colyer and Daniel Hinthorn. The pair wrote that they had been treating patients with hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin, and encouraged others to do so too “as a matter of clinical practice” once a patient tests positive. They also recommended using the drug prophylactically for healthcare workers.
The doctors did not provide any data from their own patients, but referenced the French study, writing: “Researchers in France treated a small number of patients with both hydroxychloroquine and a Z-Pak, and 100% of them were cured by day six of treatment.”
Hinthorn, the director of the division of infectious diseases at the University of Kansas medical center, responded to queries from the Guardian about the op-ed’s mischaracterization of the French study: “You are correct. Any patient left out of any analysis makes us suspicious. But what this study told us was that this was a combination that might merit further evaluation.”
He acknowledged that it is unknown whether the drug is beneficial or harmful for Covid-19 patients, but said that since no drug has as yet been proven effective, “if there is any medication that might give hope, we prefer to try it” as long as it is safe. “We should know in the next few weeks whether such a regimen was a wise decision or not.”
Hinthorn did not respond to a follow-up question about whether the op-ed should be corrected to more accurately reflect the degree of uncertainty around hydroxychloroquine. Colyer, the former governor of Kansas and a plastic surgeon, did not respond to requests for comment. He has since written a second op-ed for the Journal, also promoting hydroxychloroquine.
The idea that hydroxychloroquine is “the cure” has taken off within certain online communities, including among anti-vaxxers and followers of QAnon, a rightwing conspiracy theory. The drug has also found support from the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, a small, ultra-conservative organization that advocates against government involvement in medicine. The group launched a texting campaign to bombard physicians with demands to sign a petition against “red tape” that might prevent them from prescribing the drug, Reuters reported.
Calls for further research Away from the rancor of the partisan media, scientists and physicians continue to study the effects of the drug. In some states, including the hard-hit New York, hospitals are following Hinthorn’s rationale and using the drug since no proven therapy exists.
A group of French researchers published a refutation of the Raoult study in Médecine et Maladies Infectieuses on 30 March. The researchers, at Saint Louis hospital in France, followed the same regimen of hydroxychloroquine for 11 patients, and did not have similar results. “We found no evidence of a strong antiviral activity or clinical benefit of the combination of hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin for the treatment of our hospitalized patients with severe Covid-19,” they wrote. “Ongoing randomized clinical trials with hydroxychloroquine should provide a definitive answer regarding the alleged efficacy of this combination and will assess its safety.”
But another study – this time a randomized controlled trial – out of Wuhan, China, has sparked hope since it was circulated ahead of publication on 31 March. The trial of 62 patients found that patients with mild cases of Covid-19 who were treated with hydroxychloroquine recovered faster than those who did not – and none of them progressed to “severe” illness. The study has not yet been peer-reviewed.
The authors of the study urged further research and large-scale clinical trials to better understand how the drug operates and how best to use it.
The danger of presidential misinformation The hype around hydroxychloroquine has not been without casualties.
Heightened demand for the drug has left longtime patients – including lupus patients who have long used it as an anti-inflammatory – forced to go without. Overdoses have also been reported in the US and Nigeria as frightened individuals attempt to self-medicate.
Social media companies, who have been proactive about policing misinformation about coronavirus, have taken some steps to counter the spread of false claims. Google took down the Google document by Rigano , though the company has not responded to numerous requests for an explanation. Twitter has also deleted tweets by the Brazilian president, Jair Bolsonaro, Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani, and the Fox News personality Laura Ingraham that touted the efficacy of hydroxychloroquine.
But it’s hard to see how these small enforcement actions by internet platforms can have much of an impact when the president of the United States continues to use his platform to promote the drug, as he did during his daily briefings on Saturday and again on Sunday.
Trump’s promotion of the drug has raised questions about his motivation, and on Monday the New York Times reported that the president holds “a small personal financial interest” in Sanofi, the company that makes a brandname version of hydroxychloroquine. (The drug’s patent has expired so other pharmaceutical companies can manufacture generic versions.)
As a piece of viral misinformation, the hydroxychloroquine meme has amassed an extraordinary list of validators, starting with its placement in a respectable peer-reviewed journal. (Though misinformation stemming from academia is not without precedent; the paper that touched off the false belief in a link between autism and the measles vaccine was published in one of the most respected publications in medicine, and only retracted 12 years later.) It’s also very difficult to refute, because none of the hydroxychloroquine narrative’s critics can or will say anything definitive about its efficacy. Uncertainty and a call to await further study is a weak sword to bring to a fight against an overly confident propagandist.
Trump’s unscientific embrace of hydroxychloroquine is not common, but there are historical examples of heads of state spreading misinformation during pandemics. One recent, tragic example is the HIV-denialism of the South African president Thabo Mbeki, who rejected the use of antiretroviral drugs for his country’s citizens and instead promoted nutritional remedies such as beetroot juice and garlic. Researchers at the Harvard school of public health ultimately placed the death toll of Mbeki’s policies at approximately 330,000.
Noymer, the UC Irvine epidemiologist, said that the two situations were not quite analogous, since hydroxychloroquine has a “plausible mechanism” to combat the coronavirus, while beetroot juice never did.
Still, Noymer said that the influence that a president can have over a population’s attitude toward a medicine or drug is significant. He recalled President Gerald Ford publicly receiving a flu shot in 1976, amid fear that a new swine flu could lead to a pandemic.
“There was a photograph of him rolling up a sleeve and getting a shot, and the uptake on the flu shot was enormous,” Noymer said. “When the president of the United States does something, it’s quite the endorsement.”
As for Trump, it does not appear likely that he will stop hyping the drug anytime soon, nor that he will take responsibility if anything goes wrong.
“What do you have to lose?” he said on Sunday. “They say, take it. I’m not looking at it one way or the other … If it does work, it would be a shame if we didn’t do it early. I’ve seen things that I sort of like, so what do I know?
If only hydroxychloroquine could cure Trump Derangement Syndrome
Not every Democrat has COVID-19; but they all – uniformly – apparently suffer from TDS, better known as Trump Derangement Syndrome. Symptoms of this wide-spread affliction include the inability to ever concede, or even imagine, that President Trump might possibly be right about something, sometime.
The most idiotic recent outbreak of this highly communicable disease surrounds the argument over chloroquine and its less toxic derivative hydroxychloroquine. In mid-March, as the coronavirus surged, President Trump mentioned that the latter anti-malaria drug appeared to have “tremendous promise” as a therapy for treating COVID-19 patients. He said it “could be a game-changer, and maybe not,” acknowledging that the jury was still out.
Trump noted that the drug has been available for decades to treat malaria and thus its side-effects are well known. It is also inexpensive and available from numerous suppliers, all of which might recommend it to our pragmatic president.
Trump’s hopeful assertion was widely mocked by the liberal media, who did not welcome the president’s optimism. And yet, the New York Times reported at the time that hospitals across the country were loading up on the drug, responding to reports that in some instances it was saving lives. The Times noted that, “Laboratory studies have found that they prevent the coronavirus from invading cells, suggesting that the drugs could help prevent or limit the infection.”
Reviewing the available literature about the efficacy of the anti-malaria treatments, The Journal of Critical Care on March 10 described chloroquine as “widely used, safe and cheap, [and] effective in viral infections in pre-clinical studies.”
The Journal included reports from Chinese trials finding “Chloroquine phosphate… had demonstrated marked efficacy and acceptable safety in treating COVID-19 associated pneumonia in multicentre clinical trials conducted in China.” Further, both the Dutch and Italian equivalents of the CDC have suggested using chloroquine to treat severe infections requiring admission to the hospital and oxygen therapy.
So, it wasn’t as though Trump was making it up; there were indeed indications that the drugs might help. Why, then, the blow-back?
First, our health agencies are extremely cautious, and ponderous. One of the reasons our coronavirus testing was so chaotic and insufficient was that the FDA delayed granting “emergency use authorization” for making the tests and then the CDC insisted on controlling the manufacture of the kits, all of which prolonged the process.
Caution is, of course, a good thing when prescribing drugs or promising cures. But as thousands are dying from a plague that has no known remedy, maybe it is worth fast-tracking studies and approvals, and allowing people and doctors the chance to experiment with a drug that is widely known and considered safe for most people.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, a senior member of the White House task force and a respected epidemiologist, has cautioned that hydroxychloroquine may not be a “knockout drug,” adding that “We still need to do the definitive studies to determine whether any intervention, not just this one, is truly safe and effective.”
He is right, of course, which is why President Trump has pushed the FDA to accelerate its testing of the therapy; in both New York State and Detroit, large-scale clinical trials are getting underway.
Meanwhile, the press has had a field day, portraying Trump’s optimism about the drugs as reckless, ill-informed and even self-serving. The Times in mid-March ran with this headline: “With Minimal Evidence, Trump Asks F.D.A. to Study Malaria Drugs for Coronavirus,” even as in that article it noted that “Doctors in China, South Korea and France have reported that the treatments seem to help.”
The reporters are worried that there have not been “the kind of large, carefully controlled studies that would…[prove] these drugs work on a significant scale.” Right, but such a trial in the midst of a global pandemic could be viewed as a luxury we don’t have.
More recently, scolds at the Times described Trump’s optimism as “a striking example of his brazen willingness to distort and outright defy expert opinion and scientific evidence.” They also dismissed “A small trial by Chinese researchers” because it had not been “peer reviewed” and reports of the drug’s usefulness from China and France because outcomes had not been compared with those of a control group.
Unrepentant, the president has continued to mention hydroxychloroquine, possibly encouraged by more anecdotal evidence of its effectiveness and also real-life examples of people who say their lives have been saved by the drug. A Democratic state representative from Detroit credits her recent recovery from the virus to her use of the anti-malarial drug in combination with antibiotics, and thanked the president for making public the possible benefits of hydroxychloroquine.
Recently, too, the American Thoracic Society, a group specializing in treating respiratory diseases, issued guidelines endorsing hydroxychloroquine for seriously ill COVID-19 patients with pneumonia.
None of that has swayed the media. It’s almost as though Trump’s critics don’t want hydroxychloroquine to work. It is almost as though they hope this pandemic rolls endlessly forward, depressing the economy and undermining President Trump’s chances of being reelected.
MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski hit a new TDS low, even for her, when she speculated that perhaps President Trump had a “financial tie” to the drug. Mika thinks the president may be touting the drug for personal gain.
Perhaps the cynical talking head doesn’t understand how high the stakes are for this president, and for the world. President Trump is hoping, praying, that we can find a cure and save lives, bring the economy back to life and get the public back to work.
I'll give you credit for trying to use some science to refute the points in the article on the largest study to date, but your article still doesn't address the baked science behind hydoxychloroquine.
I'm all for clinical trials. What I'm not all for is touting some "cure" that doesn't even exist or has shown little to no efficacy. You should be careful what you believe.
I don't know why Trump is pushing the cocaine or ritalin he snorts. He's been exposed numerous times and avoided testing positive while others around him did.
Now, knowing you, you'll cite the source and say it's fake.
It does, however, appear to be helping. Imagine you, yourself, laying in a hospital room, getting worse and worse. And the doc says "we can do hydroxychlorquine and zinc, which some are reporting has worked and even with in 12 hours but the dems haven't given their approval, OR, we can intubate you, put you on a ventilator that we actually now think could possibly cause more damage."
What do you "choose", as it really wouldn't be your choice.
Anecdotal evidence in a time of crisis is exactly that. It is evidence, good bad or indifferent.
You cannot do a controlled study in a time of crisis that would be defensible from a clinical research prospective. There is no time, people are dying.
You go with what you have, or what you think is best. Hopefully there is no harm.
The alternative is a higher probability of death.
I think the statement of 100 percent cure is total horse hockey. That does not exist. I think the hype and dismissals are both counterproductive.
It should be viewed as a temporary strategy, until the results of a clinical trial become available.
I think the hype and dismissals are both counterproductive.
Totally agree with this. There are enough people out there that feel it helped them that I'd be willing to give it a try if I came down with the virus. I wouldn't rely on uninformed politicians and pundits with an axe to grind telling me whether or not to take it. It's just as bad from both directions.
And into the forest I go, to lose my mind and find my soul. - John Muir
Anecdotal evidence in a time of crisis is exactly that. It is evidence, good bad or indifferent.
You cannot do a controlled study in a time of crisis that would be defensible from a clinical research prospective. There is no time, people are dying.
You go with what you have, or what you think is best. Hopefully there is no harm.
The alternative is a higher probability of death.
I think the statement of 100 percent cure is total horse hockey. That does not exist. I think the hype and dismissals are both counterproductive.
It should be viewed as a temporary strategy, until the results of a clinical trial become available.
They say Mr. President killed people out one side of their mouths and then bash him for trying things to save peoples lives out the other side of their mouths ...
When your dying ... anecdotal smanecdotal ... lets give it a whirl ... witch would be the same thing the hypocrites would say if it was them or a loved one ...
It must really irk you guys that Hydroxychloroquine is saving lives.
Shame!
There is actually precious little evidence, anywhere, to support this viewpoint, and what there is of it is merely anecdotal and nothing where the results can be definitely tied to the use of hydroxychloroquine.
THAT is the actual problem with hydroxychloroquine.
Not only is there nothing more than anecdotal evidence at this point that it saves lives, there is absolutely ZERO evidence - NOTHING - to support any notion that it prevents cases from advancing to the severe/critical care stage, which is precisely what any treatment for COVID-19 absolutely MUST do for it to be of any value whatsoever.
The entire issue has nothing at all to do with Trump except that people are hung up on him wanting it to be tried and fast-tracked. It has everything to do with the fact that the French "study" was bogus and used a craptastic measurement of "not dead" as its determiner of success.
I'm all for us getting things to clinical trials, and I'm all for trying hydroxychloroquine and even Viagra like the Chinese did, but the odd fanaticism that has sprung up around this drug is just mind-boggling. It has proven nothing, yet people are shouting for everyone to use it. Well, my buddy is on it and has been since March 31, and he still ended up in the ICU where he still is.
Browns is the Browns
... there goes Joe Thomas, the best there ever was in this game.
Call me old fashion, but I’ll take the word of an actual doctor of medicine over the WH spin doctors.
You posted this at 2:55. At 3:15 I posted 3 sources, with doctors. It is now 4:18, yet no reply?
I can imagine you laying in a hospital room, close to death, and you saying "No, don't treat me with that unproven drug that has helped others, because Trump mentioned it."
Do I blame anyone for throwing stuff against the wall and praying it works? Nope. Do I think it should be hyped beyond what it has been demonstrated to accomplish? No.
As for anecdotal evidence? Hmmm - anyone ever hear of the Placebo Effect? Could easily be nothing more than that ... and to be honest if that is all it is, it's still worth administering. But let's be factual and candid with that and not imply that it might be the answer we've been looking for ... I am pretty sure if the affect was that positive, we would have verified and seen it all across the world.
The more things change the more they stay the same.
If you read the article, a French doctor states it was a 100% cure. Elon Musk hopped on that bandwagon as well.
The French doctor, who purposefully excluded certain cases that weren’t responding, had a guy who started promoting this drug. It then made the rounds.
Now we’re talking about this drug as some magical cure that the evil FDA is limiting because “regulations are bad cause Ronald Reagan told me so” nonsense.
Trying things is fine, but spewing anti-science rhetoric is dangerous and can kill people.
Odd ... cause that’s not what Cuomo said on tv this week ... he said it helped a lot of people ... i have no clue but that’s what the man said ... and I’ve heard plenty of doctors say it helps ...
U can ask 50 docs and get 50 slightly different opinions on it ...
FACTS are very elusive on many different issues with this virus including potential drugs that may alleviate the symptoms ...
There’s questions about the malaria drug that helps coved patients ... the governor in Mich refused it at first and is now allowing it ... Cuomo still won’t allow it ...
Way to many unknowns here ... I’m surprised your taking such a hard line stance when so many things are still unknown about the disease and drugs used to offset it ...
I think the hype and dismissals are both counterproductive.
Totally agree with this. There are enough people out there that feel it helped them that I'd be willing to give it a try if I came down with the virus. I wouldn't rely on uninformed politicians and pundits with an axe to grind telling me whether or not to take it. It's just as bad from both directions.
Fauci is taking the classical "it has not been demonstrated in a peer review study and published in a scientific journal approach" His approach is technically correct and what I would expect him to say.
The reality is that someone made an observation, tried it, observed some benefit, and has spread the word that it may be a therapeutic drug to help fight the disease.
Other have hyped it or dismissed it. And created a mess.
That should not stop others from performing a better evaluation.
But if you are a Doctor on the front line having to deal with individual who are in your care, you are probably going to dig into the information a bit more to see if it would help those most in need.
I see both sides on this subject. I will also say that I know what it is like to get a peer reviewed paper published. So I am very sensitive about time, as this can be a long involved process.
They say Mr. President killed people out one side of their mouths and then bash him for trying things to save peoples lives out the other side of their mouths ...
When your dying ... anecdotal smanecdotal ... lets give it a whirl ... witch would be the same thing the hypocrites would say if it was them or a loved one ...
Hey, try keeping my name out of your mouth. Anybody that took advice from you would have to be a moron.
You are full of BS.....Allow what? You’re saying doctors are not allowed to prescribe Hydroxychloroquine to their patients? Pure BS..... pffft the trump era.
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." Thomas Jefferson.
It must really irk you guys that Hydroxychloroquine is saving lives.
Shame!
There is actually precious little evidence, anywhere, to support this viewpoint, and what there is of it is merely anecdotal and nothing where the results can be definitely tied to the use of hydroxychloroquine.
THAT is the actual problem with hydroxychloroquine.
Not only is there nothing more than anecdotal evidence at this point that it saves lives, there is absolutely ZERO evidence - NOTHING - to support any notion that it prevents cases from advancing to the severe/critical care stage, which is precisely what any treatment for COVID-19 absolutely MUST do for it to be of any value whatsoever.
The entire issue has nothing at all to do with Trump except that people are hung up on him wanting it to be tried and fast-tracked. It has everything to do with the fact that the French "study" was bogus and used a craptastic measurement of "not dead" as its determiner of success.
I'm all for us getting things to clinical trials, and I'm all for trying hydroxychloroquine and even Viagra like the Chinese did, but the odd fanaticism that has sprung up around this drug is just mind-boggling. It has proven nothing, yet people are shouting for everyone to use it. Well, my buddy is on it and has been since March 31, and he still ended up in the ICU where he still is.
I'm not happy he's making money on it and pushing it.
They say Mr. President killed people out one side of their mouths and then bash him for trying things to save peoples lives out the other side of their mouths ...
When your dying ... anecdotal smanecdotal ... lets give it a whirl ... witch would be the same thing the hypocrites would say if it was them or a loved one ...
Hey, try keeping my name out of your mouth. Anybody that took advice from you would have to be a moron.
How is he making money on it? He has a small investment in a mutual fund that has some money invested in a commpany that makes it. I have a small investment in a mutual fund/funds that probably has money invested in things I don't even know about. Bet you do too, as well as any union, etc.
Information for Clinicians on Therapeutic Options for Patients with COVID-19 Updated April 7, 2020
There are no drugs or other therapeutics approved by the US Food and Drug Administration to prevent or treat COVID-19. Current clinical management includes infection prevention and control measures and supportive care, including supplemental oxygen and mechanical ventilatory support when indicated. Interim guidelines for the medical management of COVID-19 will be provided soon by the Department of Health and Human Services COVID-19 Treatment Guidelines Panel.
Remdesivir Remdesivir is an investigational intravenous drug with broad antiviral activity that inhibits viral replication through premature termination of RNA transcription and has in-vitro activity against SARS-CoV-2 and in-vitro and in-vivo activity against related betacoronaviruses. Information about clinical trials of remdesivir is available at ClinicalTrials.govexternal icon. Remdesivir is also available through an expanded access programexternal icon from the manufacturer, Gilead Sciences.
Hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine Hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine are oral prescription drugs that have been used for treatment of malaria and certain inflammatory conditions. Hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine are under investigation in clinical trials for pre-exposure or post-exposure prophylaxis of SARS-CoV-2 infection, and treatment of patients with mild, moderate, and severe COVID-19. More information on clinical trials can be found at ClinicalTrials.govexternal icon. FDA issued an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) to authorize use of chloroquine and hydroxychloroquineexternal icon from the Strategic National Stockpile for treatment of hospitalized adults and adolescents (weight ≥50 kg) with COVID-19 for whom a clinical trial is not available or participation is not feasible.
Other Drugs Several other drugs (e.g., investigational antivirals, immunotherapeutic, host-directed therapies) are under investigation in clinical trials or are being considered for clinical trials of pre-exposure prophylaxis, post-exposure prophylaxis, or treatment of COVID-19 in the United States and worldwide. Information on registered clinical trials for COVID-19 in the United States is available at ClinicalTrials.govexternal icon. FDA has issued guidance for administering or studying use of convalescent plasma for treatmentexternal icon of patients with COVID-19.
The primary purpose of a doctor in a time of crisis is to save the life that is in front of them.
They are not in a double blind random clinical trial.
If a Doctor sees it, uses the drug and sees a benefit, they are probably going to use it again, without a double blind random clinical trial, simply because they would not be following their primary purpose.
It is how stuff happens, good and bad, there are risks and rewards.
Anedotal information has value.
People that participate in those trials have to give their consent, and may not want to do so, fearing that they would be part of the control (placebo) group.
Lots of crazy things happen when lots of people are dying very fast.
Although I do believe that if more evidence shows those receiving the drug show more promise, those in the control are immediately given the drug being tested, right?
So they may start off on the control, but they could potentially be put on the drug that is improving conditions?
There are times I really question the anti Trumpers, because they are anti anything he does or says. Sadly for them, he's been ahead of them, which I know ticks them off.
They've been after him since even before day 1, and they've been prove wrong over and over and over.
This drug isn't something you just go out and buy. It's a prescription drug, meaning a doctor needs to prescribe it. And, more and more, doctors are, and more and more, it's working. Perfectly? No. Most that die from covid had underlying health issues, like the 1 day old baby in Louisianna, that was listed as a casualty of covid.........and we learn her mom had the virus, but the baby was born prematurely at week 22 of gestation. Yet, the baby was considered a 'death by covid" victim.
Hundreds of examples, yet one side cares not about facts - just attacking the president on anything. Including what doctors are now saying is/might be working.
I think there's a few on here that don't care about the helping part, they care only about attacking the president. Sad ass people.
Call me old fashion, but I’ll take the word of an actual doctor of medicine over the WH spin doctors.
Totally agree with this. There are enough people out there that feel it helped them that I'd be willing to give it a try if I came down with the virus. I wouldn't rely on uninformed politicians and pundits with an axe to grind telling me whether or not to take it. It's just as bad from both directions.
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