(Bloomberg)
President Donald Trump once again on Saturday promoted an anti-malaria drug for the treatment of patients infected with coronavirus.
Trump retweeted an online post about a small scientific study that had been making the rounds on Twitter for several days: A decades-old anti-malarial drug called hydroxychloroquine, the tweet said, eradicated the new coronavirus from patients’ bodies when combined with a popular antibiotic.
The same study had already attracted attention from Elon Musk. Hospitals, anticipating a surge of demand, are stockpiling the drug. Medical institutions are gearing up to conduct further studies. Urgent-care centers and telehealth companies have seen increasing numbers of patients requesting hydroxychloroquine as they read about it online, and patients who actually require the drugs have at times not been able to obtain them.
But as attention and demand for hydroxychloroquine mounts, there’s one thing desperately missing — solid proof that it actually works. While hydroxychloroquine and its cousin, chloroquine, have shown some early promise, neither has the scientific evidence to back their use in large numbers of patients, say experts.
The study tweeted out by President Trump looked at 26 patients who had been hospitalized with COVID-19 in France, and compared them to 16 patients at another facility who did not receive the treatment. Of all 26 patients that got hydroxychloroquine, six also received azithromycin, an antibiotic. The six patients who got the antibiotic appeared to clear the virus from their bodies.
“The data is insufficient,” said Caesar Djavaherian, co-founder and medical director of Carbon Health, a telehealth company and group of 16 clinics in the Bay Area. Everyday over the past week, he said, patients have come in requesting to try the drug. “The president and others that have publicized this drug have really puts us in a tough spot,” he said.
David Ho, a famed AIDS researcher based at Columbia University, has given his laboratory over to studying COVID-19 and the virus that causes it, SARS-CoV-2. He too said there were significant shortcomings in the trial Trump promoted.
The treatment didn’t appear to actually make a difference in whether patients lived or got better, Ho said. And it’s possible that the decreases in the amount of virus found were because of flaws in how samples were collected, or the patients may have simply recovered on their own — as most do.
Hydroxychloroquine and the more-toxic drug it is derived from, chloroquine, are also commonly used to treat rheumatoid arthritis and lupus. They have not been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to treat COVID-19.