Well Trump may be correct about this drug. After all he has a good feeling about it. I wonder what someone who really knows 'something' about these things thinks?
How about this guy:
Christopher Plowe, PhD, a professor of global health at Duke University and a world-renowned expert on malaria drugs (including hydroxychloroquine)
Here is what he had to say about Trump's comments. . .
Trump spoke of the issue more bluntly on Sunday, encouraging Americans to take the drug by saying: “What do you have to lose? What do you have to lose?”
According to Plowe, who has been studying the drug for decades, Trump’s statements are misguided. “You can lose your life. That's pretty clear. This is a drug that can cause serious side effects. The eye issues tend to be people who've taken it for a long time. But the really serious cardiac issues — the potentially fatal cardiac arrhythmias — those can occur the first time you take the drug,”
“And it's not just older people who have heart issues, who are at risk. It can even occur in people with normal hearts, so that's a real concern.”
The most
common side effects associated with hydroxychloroquine are headache, dizziness, nausea and vomiting, but cardiotoxicity — “medication-induced damage to the heart” — has been
documented as a “rare but serious complication” of the drug. Z-packs, as Trump mentioned, have also been
tied to deadly heart complications
In the press briefing on Tuesday, Trump said that healthcare workers are beginning to take the drug prior to getting sick. “They also say it's good for the hospital workers to take them that it keeps it away, it keeps it out of your system,” Trump said. It’s a claim he also raised over the weekend: “They say taking [hydroxychloroquine] before the fact is good,” he said, adding that he “may take it.”
“I have not seen any such evidence,” says Plowe. “We use chloroquine for malaria prophylaxis, but ... it’s just one pill a week basically.” Plowe explains that taking hydroxychloroquine as a preventative would require a completely different dosage and schedule. “Even if there was strong evidence — which we don't have — even if there were strong evidence that it was beneficial at higher treatment doses until you have a randomized controlled trial with a prophylactic ... I don't even know what dose he would take if he was going to take it,” says Plowe. “I am not aware of any evidence about prevention or prophylactic doses for this indication.”
Much of the discussion surrounding the drug’s success has been anecdotal, but in Plowe’s experience, even that is unimpressive. “My son is the emergency room resident in a hospital in Brooklyn and he has seen people who have been taking hydroxychloroquine and Z-packs in the community and his anecdotal impression is that it’s making no difference whatsoever,” Plowe says. “And he's seeing patients day in and day out. So that's my anecdotal evidence that clinicians on the front lines — at least the one that I'm talking to — [are] not seeing any suggestion that this is making a difference.”
Trump can believe anything he wants, science doesn't give a shit what he believes
