In White House briefings on Saturday and Sunday, Trump urged Americans worried about the virus to try hydroxychloroquine, a drug used to treat malaria, arthritis and lupus that has not been extensively tested for other conditions.
“Take it. What do you have to lose?” the president said on Saturday, suggesting that he might do so himself after asking “my doctors”.
On Sunday, Trump said the country doesn’t have time “to take a couple years” to test the efficacy of the drug in treating Covid-19.
But Dr Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top doctor on infectious diseases and a key member of the White House task force, was adamant there was nothing to suggest the medicine had any benefit against coronavirus.
“In terms of science, I don’t think we can definitively say it works,” he told CBS’s Face the Nation.
“The data are really just at best suggestive. There have been cases that show there may be an effect and there are others to show there’s no effect.”
Dr James Phillips, professor of emergency medicine at George Washington University hospital, said Americans could be risking their health if they followed the president’s advice to take a drug for a condition for which it had not been tested.
“We don’t know enough to make medical recommendations,” he told CNN’s Reliable Sources.
“It’s a dangerous message for someone without a medical license to get up there and tell people to try it. You need to listen to physicians, people who understand science, before you go willy-nilly into the medicine cabinet.”
Fauci has been reluctant to directly criticise the president, with whom he speaks regularly, but has found himself repeatedly having to contradict the president over hydroxychloroquine, which has become a hobby horse at White House briefings.
On 21 March, the day after another nationally-televised Trump claim that the drug “looked promising”, Fauci was asked directly if it could be used to treat Covid-19.
“The answer is no,” he said.
Last month, a man in Arizona died after he and his wife took chloroquine phosphate, an additive used to clean fish tanks that is also found in hydroxychloroquine.
“Trump kept saying it was basically pretty much a cure,” the man’s wife told NBC.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/ ... laria-drug
