Snake oil salesman takes his own ‘miracle cure’ – what could possibly go wrong?

On Sunday, the Washington Post posted this editorial opinion. The results are in. Trump’s miracle drug is useless.

THE HYPE over the drug hydroxychloroquine was fueled by President Trump and Fox News, whose hosts touted it repeatedly on air. The president’s claims were not backed by scientific evidence, but he was enthusiastic. “What do you have to lose?” he has asked. In desperation, the public snapped up pills and the Food and Drug Administration issued an emergency use authorization on March 28 for the drug to be given to hospitalized patients. On Thursday, Mr. Trump declared, “So we have had some great response, in terms of doctors writing letters and people calling on the hydroxychloroquine.”

Now comes the evidence. Two large studies of hospitalized patients in New York City have found the drug was essentially useless against the virus.

One study, by Eli S. Rosenberg and colleagues, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, examined 1,438 patients suffering from infection across 25 hospitals in the New York area between March 15 and 28. The study also looked at those who received hydroxychloroquine along with the antibiotic azithromycin. Mr Trump had heralded the combination as “a real chance to be one of the biggest game changers in the history of medicine.” The conclusion of the study: “Among patients hospitalized in metropolitan New York with COVID-19, treatment with hydroxychloroquine, azithromycin, or both, compared with neither treatment, was not significantly associated with differences in in-hospital mortality.”

The second study, by Joshua Geleris and colleagues, examined 1,376 patients at New York-Presbyterian Hospital-Columbia University Irving Medical Center in northern Manhattan from March 7 to April 8. Their conclusion in the New England Journal of Medicine: “In this analysis involving a large sample of consecutive patients who had been hospitalized with Covid-19, the risk of intubation or death was not significantly higher or lower among patients who received hydroxychloroquine than among those who did not.” The results, they said, “do not support the use of hydroxychloroquine at present” except in clinical trials.

The two studies were observational. Separate, controlled clinical trials are underway, including one sponsored by the National Institutes of Health. But both of these hospital studies examined a group of patients significantly larger than the tiny, initial research by the maverick doctor Didier Raoult in Marseille, France, that triggered the frenzy. If the drug had any effectiveness against the coronavirus, it would probably have shown some positive results among more than 2,800 hospitalized patients in New York. It did not.

[O]n April 24, the FDA cautioned against use of the drug for coronavirus patients outside closely supervised hospital settings, pointing to known side affects such as heart trouble. The FDA should now revoke the emergency use authorization, especially if the clinical trials confirm what the two hospital studies have shown.

In a crisis, all possibilities must be investigated. But evidence is mounting that hydroxychloroquine was a dud against the coronavirus. Mr. Trump ought to use his bully pulpit to tell the American people that his “game changer” was nothing of the sort.

Donald Trump can never admit that he was wrong.

Not only did he not do as The Post suggests, but he doubled-down on Monday afternoon blurting out during a presser that he has been taking a cocktail of hydroxychloroquine and zinc for over a week now as a prophylactic against getting COVID-19, in a White House where everyone appears to be testing positive over the past couple of weeks.

What, you’re not chugging bleach or huffing Lysol “Dr. Trump”? You’re not having someone blow sunshine up your ass?

Not to alarm, but damn! I think it’s time that Mike Pence gets up off the bench and starts warming up in the bullpen.

Politico reports, ‘Crazy thing to do’: Health experts alarmed by Trump’s use of unproven drug:

President Donald Trump’s startling admission Monday that he is taking hydroxychloroquine despite testing negative for the coronavirus alarmed health experts, who cautioned that people who follow his lead risk serious heart problems and other complications from the decades-old drug.

The treatment has been shown in observational studies to have limited or no proven benefits for coronavirus patients, and could even be harmful when used in certain combinations. But data from more extensive studies are still forthcoming. Public health experts expressed concern that Trump’s continued advocacy of the drug could cause another run on supplies, with serious consequences for patients with lupus, rheumatoid arthritis and other autoimmune diseases for which it is an approved treatment.

You know, the patients who actually need this drug to stay alive.

Despite [claiming to] testing negative, Trump told reporters he has been taking the drug in combination with other medicines for a “couple of weeks.” That is around the same time the first two cases of coronavirus were confirmed in the White House.

Can anyone believe anything this White House says? I can’t imagine that any responsible physician who wants to keep his medical license prescribed a potentially dangerous drug as a prophylactic against getting COVID-19. I stick by my theory that Trump has COVID-19 and is an asymptomatic super-spreader, hence the outbreak at the White House, and that is why the White House doctor risked his medical license prescribing a cocktail of hydroxychloroquine and zinc to treat Trump. It is the only medically reasonable explanation. Otherwise, this is just a reckless and dangerous act.

Money is the only thing that motivates Trump. Perhaps this is the reason. Trump and his associates stand to profit from an unproven treatment he promotes for COVID-19.

There have been only limited results from studies on whether hydroxychloroquine could be effective as a prophylactic measure. Given the drug’s potentially harsh side effects, medical experts strongly cautioned they wouldn’t prescribe the drug to patients as a preventive measure.

“That seems to me to be a crazy thing to do,” said David Juurlink, head of clinical pharmacology at the University of Toronto. “If the drug had no side effects, it would be a reasonable thing to do.”

Trump would appear be part of the cohort most at risk of taking the drug in this manner. The president has a common heart disease, with a buildup of plaque in his blood vessels, according to records the White House released after his 2018 physical exam.

Monday’s disclosure mixed the defiance Trump has displayed since the early days of the pandemic with a heightened sense of vulnerability. The president has insisted the country can reopen for business as the virus continues to spread, questioned death tolls and dismissed some assertions by his health advisers. And yet he appears willing to take an unproven drug he insists is effective as the virus spreads to his inner circle.

Trump’s doctor, Sean Conley, said he and the president had “numerous discussions” about the evidence surrounding hydroxychloroquine, according to a newly released White House memo that didn’t specify a treatment regimen.

“We concluded the potential benefit from treatment outweighed the relative risks,” Conley wrote.

Dr. Conley can try to explain this to the Board of Medical Examiners in order to keep his license to practice medicine.

Experts also worried that Trump’s latest comments would spark another dash to scoop up hydroxychloroquine, which has been on FDA’s shortage list since late March after the president began hyping the drug as a potential treatment. State pharmacy boards last month cracked down on dispensing the drug after Trump’s boosterism prompted a surge in demand.

Even before Trump’s comments, the head of the FDA’s drug office earlier Monday expressed concern for vulnerable patients who depend on the drug.

“It’s a necessary drug for them and not having access would have terrible consequences,” tweeted Janet Woodcock, director of the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research.

So Trump is creating a secondary health crisis for those patients who rely on hydroxychloroquine. Haven’t you killed enough people already?

Trump’s former secretary of Veterans Affairs, David Shulkin, expressed worry on Twitter that Trump’s touting of the drug would influence the public to take hydroxychloroquine without data to support its use.

Other health experts worried that patients would gravitate toward hydroxychloroquine, even as another experimental drug — Gilead’s remdesivir — has shown [greater] promise in hospitalized patients.

Aneesh Mehta, an infectious disease doctor at Emory University, said that some patients didn’t enroll in a trial of remdesivir he helped run because they wanted to take hydroxychloroquine after seeing media reports.

People, this man is a blithering idiot! Do not drink or inject cleaning products. And do not take hydroxychloroquine unless it is under the supervision of a responsible physician.