Throughout the Coronavirus pandemic, when President Donald Trump has bothered to even remotely acknowledge the actual seriousness of the problem, he’s touted malaria drugs including chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine as supposed potential cures for the disease. There was not any available clinical trial data to support his claims of effectiveness when he first wheeled them out, and now, a portrait has emerged of how Trump has pushed public health officials away from other important research in an attempt to get some of that elusive support for his theories.
As one senior Health and Human Services official put it to POLITICO:
‘Everyone is getting ahead of their skis here. All this buzz is confusing the American public, it’s confusing doctors. There’s a ton of people involved in front-line response in the government … who are getting pulled into meetings to discuss this when the data doesn’t support it.’
A second official in the same department called the endeavors “a potential wild-goose chase,” adding:
‘We have no idea if this works, and the evidence suggests it doesn’t.’
Reportedly, the president got tipped off down this path via a conversation with a top campaign donor — because of course he did. Money talks, for Trump. Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison “offered to build the government a database to track off-label prescriptions” of the malaria drugs in question, POLITICO reports, because “anecdotal” reports of their effectiveness against the Coronavirus had emerged and dramatically spiked their usage. Trump didn’t have an immediate answer for Ellison, apparently, but he seems to have been thereby tipped off to the drugs’ supposed potential, which he subsequently has touted time after time on Twitter and at public press conferences.
He’s stuck to his claims of the anti-malaria drugs’ effectiveness even through contradictions from health officials in his own administration that sometimes have been delivered at the exact same briefing at which he touted the supposed miracle cure. The World Health Organization’s own chief scientist Soumya Swaminathan has insisted that there is “no knowledge that it is going to benefit anyone.”
The World Health Organization, among many other steps, has launched a global trial of the drugs, and New York state has also launched their own trial — which, again, figures among a whole slew of response efforts from authorities.
The steps that the White House has undertaken under the shadow of Trump’s confidence in the malaria cures include the development of a data tracker for the drugs’ usage, which, for those involved, constituted “a dayslong effort that distracted from urgent tasks like trials of other medicines thought to have more potential against the virus.” Meanwhile, the Food and Drug Administration has even begun working with India-based Ipca Laboratories to try and obtain large quantities of the drug in the first place after years of the lab getting blacklisted because of a documented “cascade of failure” in their operations.
Hydroxychloroquine is already approved for treatment in the U.S. for conditions including lupus and arthritis, and the rush for the drug that the Trump administration has been driving could put treatments for those patients in jeopardy.
