Both Donald Trump and President Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil have touted chloroquine and its chemical cousin, hydrochloroquine, as not just effective against Covid-19 but pretty much as miracle cures for the disease.
Trump managed to get our own CDC to smirch its own longstanding reputation by posting misleading information on its website that gave the impression the CDC endorsed using chloroquine against the novel coronavirus.
So it’s not surprising that Bolsonaro, an equally noxious and self-aggrandizing idiot, would one-up Trump. He got a Brazilian medical institution to use patients in clinical trials of the drug, given alongside azithromycin and ceftriaxone, powerful antibiotics with their own risks and which work against bacteria, not viruses.
Well, now we know the answer to Donald Trump’s question about this drug regimen: “What have you got to lose?”
Answer: your life.
81 patients were in the study, divided into two groups. One group received a higher dose of the drugs and the other received a lower dose, about 2/3 of the amount given to the first group. The results are horrible.
- High-dose group of 41 patients: 16 deaths (39%)
- Low-dose group of 40 patients: 6 deaths (15%)
Of those 16 deaths in the high-dose group, 11 of them occurred on the very same day, Day 6 of the trials. The study was halted but more deaths occurred later.
As a reminder, many people with the new virus have mild or no symptoms. Of those who do get really sick, only a portion need hospitalization. Even fewer require drastic intervention, like intubation (a ventilator to breathe for them).
Numbers change from country to country so we’re still guess-timating but most figures for the Case Fatality Rate (CFR) — the percentage of sick people who die of the ailment — range from about 1% to 5%. That’s way less than the death rate of this aborted study. So yeah, doing nothing has a better risk than submitting to Trump’s “miracle cure.”
As experts around the world have warned, chloroquine can cause unexpected cardiac problems that may result in death. In this Brazilian study, 28% of the patients lost their lives. That, Mr. President and Senhor Presidente, is what people have to lose.
Even had this study produced some positive results — patients recovering better or faster than patients elsewhere — it would have been fairly pointless. It did not include a control group (that is, patients not given the drugs or given a placebo). So it would have been pretty much impossible to compare outcomes and know if chloroquine really had helped in some way.
In other words, it seems to me like these people died just to test the pet theories of two awful, awful people who have no business giving their medical recommendations to anyone ever.
I would say both of you should STFU, stop practicing medicine, and go back to presidenting but neither of you do that worth a damn either. So just go away. Far away. Now.
Assholes.
Sources
Coronavirus: murieron 11 pacientes en Brasil tras recibir altas dosis de cloroquina at El Tribuno (in Spanish)
Heart risk concerns mount around use of chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine for Covid-19 treatment at CNN
