Experts sound caution on supposed quick remedy
US President Donald Trump touted them as a way of treating novel coronavirus patients, New York state has started clinical trials of them, several countries are using them to battle the virus, and pharmacists in New York, Los Angeles and other cities say the drug is out of stock following news of it being a potential treatment.
What sparked the rush for the drug was a tweet that Trump sent out.
“Hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin, taken together have a real chance to be one of the biggest game changers in the history of medicine,” he said on March 21. “The (Food and Drug Administration) has moved mountains — Thank you!”
Within days after Trump expressed his support for the drugs, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo announced the FDA had given his state approval to carry out experimental trials. “There’s a good basis to believe they could work,” he said.
Pharmacists nationwide have said the drug is out of stock after news of it being a potential treatment spread. Two pharmaceutical companies, Teva Pharmaceuticals and Mylan Inc, said they would ramp up production of the medicine in case it was found to work.
But scientists, researchers, drug regulatory bodies and epidemiologists, including Anthony
Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and a member of the White House coronavirus task force, disagreed. They have raised a caution flag: The drugs must first undergo rigorous scientific testing before use.
“The information that you’re referring to specifically is anecdotal,” he said at the White House news conference after Trump mentioned it. “It was not done in a controlled clinical trial, so you really can’t make any definitive statement about it.”
Chloroquine also gained a lot of attention after a study of 36 COVID-19 patients published in France on March 17 said to have found that most patients taking the drug cleared the coronavirus from their system a lot faster than the control group.
Cuomo issued an executive order limiting new prescriptions of the anti-malarial drugs to patients with previously approved FDA conditions and to coronavirus patients taking part in the New York state-sponsored experiments.
The Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, Georgia, has said chloroquine along with hydrochloroquine are anti-parasitic, antiinflammatory drugs. The FDA approved chloroquine in 1949 to treat malaria.
FDA has not approved them to fight COVID-19, and last week it said it is still determining whether they can be used to treat patients with mild to moderate COVID-19.
CAIRO — The spread of COVID19 is now posing an especially severe challenge to the Middle East, where chronic wars, sanctions, famine, financial collapse and political unrest have hampered preventive efforts against the virus.
Tens of thousands of novel coronavirus cases have been registered in the region, Iran alone having more than 35,000 cases. Cases have also been reported in Syria and Libya, where wars rage and multitudes of displaced people are acutely vulnerable to diseases.
At such a critical moment, some Chinese medics are fighting alongside their Middle Eastern counterparts, and Chinese expertise and supplies have been warmly welcomed as the region fights the pandemic.
In Iraq’s capital, Baghdad, a new polymerase chain reaction laboratory is ready to be put into use. The laboratory, set up recently with the help of Chinese experts, is expected to greatly improve the war-torn country’s capacity to identify cases.
“Testing ability in Iraq is far from enough,” said Yang Honghui, who arrived in Baghdad on March 7 as part of a seven-member Chinese medical team sent by the Red Cross Society of China.
The laboratory, with a Chinese donation of nucleic acid test kits and other equipment, will be able to conduct about 1,000 tests a day, Yang said.
Asaad Mahdi, deputy director general of the Iraqi Ministry of Health, said: “This new laboratory will enhance our ability to deal with this pandemic for the residents of Baghdad who make up to about 20 percent of Iraq’s population.”
Iran, the worst-hit country in the Middle East, also benefited from on-site help of the Chinese experts, the Red Cross Society of China arriving in Teheran on Feb 29, 10 days after Iran reported its first confirmed case.
The Chinese medics returned to China last week after concluding their mission there.
“During the 27 days in Iran we could feel the friendship between the two peoples, and our work was widely appreciated,” said team leader Zhou Xiaohang.
Zhou, head of the Disaster Relief and Health Department of the Shanghai Branch of the Red Cross Society of China, said Chinese expertise, including on nationwide mobilization, home quarantine, and full screening and testing of suspected cases, and centralized treatment of patients, had been applied in Iran.
China has delivered aid to other countries in the region, too. A batch of medical supplies and equipment arrived in Tunisia on