Trump Promoted Hydroxychloroquine To Treat Covid 19, A Drug Now Linked To 17,000 Deaths

Forbes Innovation Healthcare Trump Promoted Hydroxychloroquine To Treat Covid 19, A Drug Now Linked To 17,000 Deaths Joshua Cohen Senior Contributor Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own. I write about prescription drug value, market access, healthcare systems, and ethics of distribution of healthcare resources Following Click to save this article.

You'll be asked to sign into your Forbes account. Got it Jan 7, 2024, 05:54pm EST Share to Facebook Share to Twitter Share to Linkedin A bottle of pills of hydroxychloroquine sit on a counter at Rock Canyon Pharmacy in Provo, Utah, on ... [+] May 20, 2020. President Donald Trump announced May 18 he had been taking hydroxychloroquine for almost two weeks as a preventative measure against Covid 19.

(Photo by GEORGE FREY / AFP) (Photo by GEORGE FREY/AFP via Getty Images) AFP via Getty Images The former president, Donald Trump, repeatedly promoted the use of hydroxychloroquine in the spring of 2020, as both a preventative against and treatment for Covid 19. He did this despite the drug not having proven effectiveness or safety.

According to a study published in the February 2024 issue of the peer reviewed journal Biomedicine & Pharmacotherapy, the pharmaceutical has now been linked to approximately 17,000 deaths. The drug known as an anti malarial for decades, hydroxychloroquine, was prescribed to patients by some doctors during the first wave of the Covid 19 pandemic “despite the absence of evidence documenting its clinical benefits.” Authors of a new study estimate that 16,990 Covid 19 patients in the U.S., France, Belgium, Italy, Spain and Turkey died as a result of taking the drug.

According to researchers, the toxicity of hydroxychloroquine in patients with Covid 19 is partially due to its severe cardiac side effects. Former President Trump made it a habit in the spring of 2020 to preside over daily briefings conducted by the White House Coronavirus Task Force, where he continually embraced preventive and therapeutic use of hydroxychloroquine .

Notably, the President’s advice directly contradicted guidance from the nation’s federal public health agencies, including the Food and Drug Administration and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. There were plenty of warnings at the time from clinical researchers and senior public health officials alike, including National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci, about the unproven, experimental nature of hydroxychloroquine and the concern that it might do more harm than good.

And this wasn’t the only time Trump gave unsound medical advice to the American people. You may recall when in April 2020 Trump infamously suggested that bleach or other disinfectant chemicals could be useful to combat coronavirus infections. In the spring of 2020, accidental poisonings as a consequence of people ingesting bleach or other household cleaners spiked in America, doubling from their levels a year before.

MORE FOR YOU Schumer, Johnson Announce New 2024 Budget Deal—But Shutdown Threat Remains Trump Loyalist Elise Stefanik Won’t Promise She’ll Certify 2024 Election Results 10 Habits Of Happy Career Climbers In A Nation Recovering From Collective Trauma This takes nothing away from the positive work of the Trump Administration during the Covid 19 pandemic, including its efforts initiating Operation Warp Speed, a public private partnership to facilitate and accelerate the development, manufacturing, and distribution of Covid 19 vaccines, therapeutics, and diagnostics.

This program has been hugely successful, as measured by the pace at which Covid 19 vaccines and treatments were developed and launched. But Trump’s issuance of unwarranted treatment recommendations left a lot to be desired. All such governmental advice must be tightly regulated and given only by those with the requisite knowledge and expertise.

This is not to say that there aren’t things that could improve at U.S. public health agencies, including messaging by medical experts. But in the end those in government disseminating messages to the public ought to be officials whose expertise isn’t in doubt. They may make mistakes, but they’re qualified practitioners of medicine or have a clinical science background.

Trump did not have this. He never should have gone to the podium and addressed the American people touting unproven therapies or dangerous substances. The moral of this story is that when presidents with no medical expertise contravene public health entities, expect trouble. This is particularly the case when a president like Trump takes center stage, upstaging rigorously trained medical professionals rather than leaving all actual healthcare decisions and guidance up to them.

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