Someone who would peddle a phony cure to millions of Americans rightfully fearful of a disease that in three months has killed more than three times the number of Americans who annually die from the flu, should really be consigned to one of Dante’s circles of Hell.
The malaria drug hydroxychloroquine did not prevent Covid-19 in a rigorous study of 821 people who had been exposed to patients infected with the virus, researchers from the University of Minnesota and Canada are reporting Wednesday.
The study was the first controlled clinical trial of hydroxychloroquine, a drug that President Trump has repeatedly promoted and said he had taken himself to try to ward off the virus.
The results of the study were published in the New England Journal of Medicine. Not exactly “fake news,” unless you have a penchant for suicide.
The president’s promotion of the drug, and the backlash against it, have politicized medical questions that would normally have been left to researchers to answer objectively. The drug is approved to treat rheumatoid arthritis and lupus, as well as malaria, and is considered safe for those patients as long as they do not have underlying abnormalities in their heart rhythm.
Studies in very ill coronavirus patients have linked the drug — especially when combined with the antibiotic azithromycin — to dangerous heart-rhythm disorders, and both the Food and Drug Administration and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases have warned that it should not be used outside of clinical trials or in hospitals.
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“The take-home message for the general public is that if you’re exposed to someone with Covid-19, hydroxychloroquine is not an effective post-exposure preventive therapy,” the lead author of the study, Dr. David R. Boulware, from the University of Minnesota, said in an interview.
In other words, it doesn’t do shit.
Of course, that didn’t stop this administration from dumping their snake-oil theories on other countries cursed with similarly incompetent leadership.
Regardless, Mr. Trump has not stopped touting the drug’s potential benefits. On Sunday, his administration announced that it was sending 2 million doses of the drug to Brazil, to treat patients and help prevent infection in health care workers.
After watching a real president take the time to promote real measures to protect American citizens, returning to the reality of our current situation is somewhat dispiriting, to say the least.
November 3rd is now five months away.