Trump says he’s taking hydroxychloroquine against
Covid-19 despite FDA warnings
President says he’s been taking drug for ‘a couple of
weeks’ but FDA has issued repeated warning about the dangers of the drug
Tom
McCarthy
@TeeMcSee
Email
Mon 18 May
2020 23.22 BSTLast modified on Tue 19 May 2020 08.02 BST
Donald
Trump has told reporters at the White House that for “a couple weeks” he has
been taking a malaria drug as a defense against Covid-19 – despite warnings
from his administration that it is dangerous.
Trump said
he was taking hydroxychloroquine – a drug approved to treat malaria, lupus and
rheumatoid arthritis – in response to the coronavirus threat.
But the
Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has been warning since April that the drug
should not be used for that purpose because it could cause irregular heartbeats
and other cardiac trauma.
The drug is
not approved as a treatment for Covid-19 and Trump has not been diagnosed with
the disease, to public knowledge.
Trump’s
claim to be taking the drug was made as he attacked an administration
whistleblower who went before Congress last week and described internal
pressure to endorse the drug as an effective coronavirus treatment.
The
whistleblower, Rick Bright, was the former director of a federal agency in
charge of vaccines.
On Monday,
Trump called Bright a hypocrite and then riffed on the supposed benefits of the
drug, which the FDA advised has “not been shown to be safe and effective for
treating or preventing Covid-19”.
“You’d be
surprised at how many people are taking it … The frontline workers many many
are taking it,” Trump said.
“I happen
to be taking it. I happen to be taking it. I’m taking it, hydroxychloroquine.
Right now, yeah. A couple weeks ago I started taking it. Because I think it’s
good, I heard a lot of good stories … I take a pill every day.”
Sean P
Conley, Trump’s physician, said in a memo that after “numerous discussions”
with the president “for and against the use of hydroxychloroquine, we concluded
the potential benefit from treatment outweighed the relative risks”.
Previously,
Trump had endorsed the injection of disinfectants or light into the body to
fight coronavirus – recommendations that were followed by a spike in calls to
poison control centers.
But Trump
had never before claimed to be trying one of the home remedies himself.
A string of
studies around the world have suggested that hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine
do little to prevent or treat Covid-19, and the FDA has cautioned against the
use of either drug for Covid-19 outside of the hospital setting or a clinical
trial “due to risk of heart rhythm problems”.
The drugs
“can cause abnormal heart rhythms such as QT interval prolongation and a
dangerously rapid heart rate called ventricular tachycardia”, the FDA said.
Dr Anthony
Fauci, the country’s top infectious disease doctor and a member of the White
House coronavirus taskforce, has repeatedly warned that there is no conclusive
evidence to support using the drug.
The United
States passed two grim milestones for coronavirus cases on Monday, surpassing
1.5m confirmed cases and 90,000 deaths, according to numbers recorded by Johns
Hopkins University.
Trump
touted hydroxychloroquine as a potential coronavirus treatment in March, a
claim that was amplified for weeks on Fox News. But alarming reports in April
about the health risks tied to the drug silenced that talk until the Bright
episode.
Bright, the
former director of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority,
told Congress last week that he was removed from his post after resisting
pressure by the administration to make “potentially harmful drugs widely
available”, including chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine.
The FDA has
issued repeated warnings about the dangers of the drugs in question.
“While
clinical trials are ongoing to determine the safety and effectiveness of these
drugs for Covid-19, there are known side effects of these medications that
should be considered,” the FDA commissioner, Stephen M Hahn, said in a
statement issued in late April. “The FDA will continue to monitor and investigate
these potential risks and will communicate publicly when more information is
available.”
Trump
acknowledged research finding that US veterans treated with hydroxychloroquine
didn’t seem to fare better than those who weren’t given the drug. The preliminary
study found that those treated with hydroxychloroquine had a higher risk of
death than those who were not. The pre-print of the study, which has been
published online without peer review, comes with many caveats. None of those
caveats include Trump’s analysis. Those behind the research “aren’t big Trump
fans”, the president said as an explanation for why he’s taking the unproven
drug. The research was a “a very unscientific report”, Trump said.
The
research was conducted by the VA and academic institutions including the
University of Virginia School of Medicine. It analyzed the cases of 368 male
coronavirus patients nationwide, 97 receiving hydroxychloroquine, 113 receiving
hydroxychloroquine in combination with the antibiotic azithromycin, and 158 not
receiving any hydroxychloroquine. This was not a randomized clinical trial, the
gold standard of drug testing, which would randomly assign hydroxychloroquine
treatment to some patients and not to others. Instead, researchers looked back
on cases – and weren’t able to account for why doctors chose to treat some
patients with the antimalarial drug and not others. It could be that those
treated with hydroxychloroquine had a higher chance of death because doctors
chose to give the most severely ill patients the unproven drug.
Maanvi Singh contributed reporting
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário