Trump’s ‘miracle’ cure a high risk
Anti-malarial drug raises chance of death 34% : study
When Donald Trump stood at the White House podium and talked about a “miracle” new drug he said could ward off Covid-19, Patricia Taylor knew she had to have it.
The president’s pitch seemed like the first bit of hope for the 60-yearold tech worker from California who had agonised for weeks about contracting the virus.
She immediately ordered the drug through an online doctor, who recommended she take one 200mg pill a week with zinc and vitamin D “until the end of the pandemic”.
“I thought — this is the Holy Grail. I now had a prescription of the drug that was the closest thing helping beat back this terrible virus,” she said. Taylor spoke to the Sunday Tele
graph just before a bombshell study was published on Friday showing the anti-malarial drug increased the risk of mortality by 34 per cent, with a 137 per cent increased risk of serious heart arrhythmia.
Since Trump first mentioned hydroxychloroquine in March there has been a run on the drug, despite scant available medical evidence to suggest it helps in the prevention or treatment of Covid-19.
Despite warnings over efficacy from America’s public health agency, among others, some 830,000 prescriptions for the anti-malarial were filled that month in the US, up 80 per cent from the previous March.
And after Trump revealed he was taking it himself last week, inquiries to doctors have gone through the roof.
Many Americans across the country taking the drug as a prophylactic dismissed scepticism from some quarters as a “liberal bias” — a telling glimpse into America’s politics of science in the age of Trump and Covid.
The president has been desperate to tout “one of the biggest game changers in the history of medicine” amid a spiralling death toll and a chaotic White House response to the pandemic.
“I think when he said he was for it, some people and the media decided to come out against it,” said Taylor, a Trump supporter, who has been taking “hydroxy” for nearly two weeks and noticed side effects of lethargy and a lack of appetite. “If he had said ‘aspirin was good, everyone should take it for Covid-19’, those people would have treated it like it was poison.”
Trump said he was persuaded of the benefits of the drug from accounts from doctors who said they had seen positive results from prescribing it to their patients. Dr Robin Armstrong, the medical director of The Resort nursing home in Texas and a member of the Republican Party’s National Committee, said he did not take the decision to prescribe it lightly.
“We were in a situation where our backs were against the wall and we were concerned that we had a lot of elderly patients who were not going to survive,” he said. But having used the drug on hospitalised patients in the past, he decided to try it in the care home.
Dr Armstrong said he had given 38 patients hydroxychloroquine, 35 of whom recovered. “That’s a 92 per cent recovery. We’re pleased with that outcome,” he said.
Jack Higgins, who works for a heating and air conditioning company in Colorado, said he believed hydroxychloroquine was behind his “miracle” recovery after he fell ill from the virus.
Despite being fit and healthy, Higgins, 31, found himself in intensive care with a temperature of 40.5C and worryingly low oxygen levels.
“They gave me hydroxychloroquine immediately,” he said. After two days his fever had gone completely.
Tech worker Taylor said taking the drug offered her “peace of mind”.
“I’m not an idiot, I don’t just do everything Trump suggests,” she said. “I know what is medically sound and what is not. I know not to drink bleach, or inject disinfectant. The pandemic has terrified the world, but here we potentially have a solution.”
The drug is only approved by the US Food and Drug Administration for malaria or autoimmune conditions such as lupus and rheumatoid arthritis.
I think when he said he was for it, some people and the media decided to come out against it.
Patricia Taylor