Unhappy that the novel coronavirus represents a serious threat to his revenue flow, Donald Trump has been promising miracle cures from the first moment he appeared. He’s suggested a “really good flu vaccine” would work. It won’t. He’s promised that a vaccine will come along much faster than scientists predict. It won’t. He’s claimed that he’s making available many other drugs that will be “game changers” that will put the coronavirus right back in its box. They will not.
There absolutely may be drugs out there which are helpful for patients dealing with COVID-19. In particular, there may be drugs that help the immune system so that those infected stand a better chance of not becoming critical cases, fighting for a shrinking pool of ventilators. But the way that Trump has promoted these drugs is as irresponsible as the way he has suppressed and distorted information about the virus itself. And it’s already costing lives.
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In one of the semi-daily coronavirus briefings just over a week ago, Trump seized on reports that the virus could be fought using chloroquine and related drugs that have long been used in fighting malaria and inflammatory conditions like rheumatoid arthritis. The evidence for this is a small set of papers, only a pair of which had faced peer review, and none of which involved a genuine clinical trial. In essence, these results are similar to ones that happen every time doctors are faced with apparently unwinnable situations and novel diseases—they try novel solutions. These solutions may generate apparent success, but they do so in conditions that are anything but a scientific trial.
Did the doctors give the drugs only to patients most likely to survive in the first place? Did they ignore the results of patients who didn’t have a favorable outcome? Did they report their hopes rather than their results? All of the above appears to have happened when it comes to chloroquine and the 2019 novel coronavirus.
None of which means that there is no evidence that this class of drugs might not constitute an effective treatment in some cases of COVID-19. In fact, there is a growing body of evidence that suggests—suggests—there is something there. Which is precisely the reason that doctors have been seeking to do the small-scale clinical trials that could generate what’s lacking at this point: real data. Chloroquine may be better than the “silver solution” being sold by faux religious hucksters. However, it still may not. Because results on small numbers of patients reported by doctors who were watching patients die all around them is a terrible place to get objective information.
Considering the daily toll that novel coronavirus is extracting, the desire to find something Right Damn Now is understandable. And the information on chloroquine and other drugs is a fantastic first step in suggesting trials that can be conducted to find real ways of addressing the virus.
What is absolutely not helpful, and is in fact absolutely, quantifiably harmful, is to have Trump stepping in front of the camera touting any of these treatments over the objections of scientists and doctors sharing the stage because he has “a feeling” about their efficacy. That is the absolute definition of irresponsibility, as well as rubbing salt into a gaping wound.
As The Wall Street Journal reports, Trump is promoting the use of a drug when no one has determined an effective dose. No one has determined a protocol. No one has determined if it really works at all. But he has set up a situation in which people are absolutely demanding that their doctors give them chloroquine-based drugs when they are positive for COVID-19. Some are even taking it as a prophylactic, believing it will protect them from getting the disease in the first place.
As a result, people with a genuine need for chloroquine—those hundreds of thousands in Africa and Asia fighting off malaria, and the millions around the world who are prescribed the drug to help with RA—are facing a shortage. This is real misery, real death, being generated because Trump thinks it’s more important that he have some shiny object to wave at America, than he do the hard work of facing this crisis. Chloroquine may turn out to be genuinely effective against COVID-19. That doesn’t alter the fact that Trump is using it as a form of denial and distraction, to turn attention away from his deadly mismanagement of this epidemic in the United States.
And the desperation he’s creating is leading to situations like this one reported by The Washington Post, in which two people in their 60s listened to Trump and noticed that they already had a chloroquine-based drug on their shelves. So they took it. But this drug, chloroquine phosphate, is used for treating fish in ponds. For humans, it’s simply poison. One of the two people who took a sip of chloroquine phosphate is now dead. The other is where no one wants to be right now—in hospital intensive care.
That death is solidly in Donald Trump’s lap. And it’s far from the only one. Every person now suffering around the world because they can’t get the medicine necessary for the disease where it is known to be effective, because they are competing with the hype coming from Dr. Don’s Traveling Medicine Show, can lay their misery directly at Trump’s feet.
