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Donald Trump’s wonder drug against Covid-19 does not work, says US study
President Trump had once promoted the antimalarial drug, by itself or in combination with the antibiotic, as a game-changer and had personally campaigned for it to be administered to Covid-19 patients.
A decades-old antimalarial drug, hydroxychloroquine, that was once touted as a game-changer by US President Donald Trump showed no benefits for Covid-19 patients observed in a large study of more than 1,400 people conducted in hospitals in New York city, the epicentre of the American epidemic.
It had no noticeable effect even when taken along with the antibiotic azithromycin, showed the study.
Cardiac arrest was a key side-effect when hydroxychloroquine was used together with azithromycin, according to the study. However, not when only the antimalarial drug was administered.
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President Trump had once promoted the antimalarial drug, by itself or in combination with the antibiotic, as a game-changer and had personally campaigned for it to be administered to patients arguing they had nothing to lose, because it had been used for decades and had been proven to be safe for humans.
The US president also tried to shore up the availability of the drug in the United States and leaned on India, one of the largest producers of hydroxychloroquine in the world, to release a massive US purchase order of the drug blocked from shipping by an export ban on it and two dozen other medicines. The Modi government lifted the curbs and the US consignment was shipped shortly.
Hydroxychloroquine is being used in India as a prophylaxis for health workers at the frontline of the country’s response to the epidemic.
“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,” researchers behind the study wrote in a article in the Journal of the AmericanMedical Association (JAMA), a weekly journal of peer-reviewed research.
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And there are side-effects of the combination, contrary to what the president had so frequently claimed. “Compared with patients receiving neither drug cardiac arrest was significantly more likely in patients receiving hydroxychloroquine + azithromycin …. but not hydroxychloroquine alone … or azithromycin alone …,” said the study.
This was an observational study of severely ill hospitalized patients who had been prescribed the medicines, and not a randomized clinical trial, the gold standard for determining the efficacy and safety of a drug. They are underway separately and results are awaited.
President Trump has not spoken of the medicines lately. News reports indicated that advance word of the findings were shared with the federal government two weeks ago.
The US Food and Drug Administration, the regulator of medicines, that had issued allowed the antimalarial drug to be used on compassionate grounds earlier restricted its use only for the clinical trials strictly under the supervision of physicians subsequently, citing toxic after effects.
But here is what Trump said last week when asked about studies questioning the use of hydroxychloroquine: “I’ve had three calls in the last three days, four days, of people that took it, and they’re giving it credit for saving their lives.” He went on to qualify it severely given new information: “Here’s -- here’s what we’ve been reduced to in this country: The Democrats, the radical left, whatever you want, would rather see people -- I’m going to be very nice. I’m not going to say “die”. I’m going to say would rather see people not get well because they think I’m going to get credit if, you know, hydroxychloroquine works.”
