Bolsonaro’s dangerous gamble
AFTER months of touting an unproven anti-malaria drug as a treatment for the new coronavirus, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro is turning himself into a test case live before millions of people as he swallows hydroxychloroquine pills on social media and encourages others to do the same.
Bolsonaro said this week that he had tested positive for the virus, but already felt better thanks to hydroxychloroquine. Hours later he shared a video of himself gulping down what he said was his third dose.
“I trust hydroxychloroquine,” he said, smiling. “And you?”
On Wednesday, he was again extolling the drug’s benefits on Facebook, and claimed that his political opponents were rooting against it.
A string of studies in Britain and the US, as well as by the World Health Organization, have found chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine ineffective against Covid-19, and sometimes deadly, because of their adverse side effects on the heart. Several studies were cancelled early because of adverse effects.
US President Donald Trump has promoted hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for Covid-19, but chloroquine – a more toxic version of the drug, produced in Brazil – has been even more enthusiastically promoted by Bolsonaro, who contends the virus is largely unavoidable and, what is more, not a serious medical problem.
“He has become the poster boy for curing Covid-19 with hydroxychloroquine,” said Paulo Calmon, a political science professor at the University of Brasilia. “Chloroquine composes part of the denialist’s political strategy, with the objective of convincing voters that the pandemic’s effects can be easily controlled.”
Trump first mentioned hydroxychloroquine on March 19 during a pandemic briefing. Two days later, and a month after Brazil’s first confirmed case, Bolsonaro took one of his only big actions to fight the coronavirus. He announced he was directing the Brazilian army to ramp up the output of chloroquine.
The army churned out more than 2 million pills – 18 times the country’s normal annual production – even as Brazil’s intensive care medicine association recommended it not be prescribed and doctors mostly complied.
The White House on May 31 said it had donated 2 million hydroxychloroquine pills to Brazil. Two weeks later the US Food & Drug Administration revoked authorisation for its emergency use, citing adverse side effects and saying it was unlikely to be effective.
Meanwhile, stocks of sedatives and other medications used in intensive care ran out in three states, according to a late-June report from Brazil’s council of state health secretariats.
Brazil’s interim health minister, an army general with no health experience before April, endorsed chloroquine as a Covid-19 treatment days after assuming the post in May. His predecessor, a doctor and health consultant, quit rather than do so. Brazil’s death toll is close to 68 000. In Brazil’s largest city, Sao Paulo, three doctors treating Covid-19 in different hospitals said that patients routinely requested chloroquine as the pandemic spread, often citing Bolsonaro.
All say they worry Bolsonaro’s cheer-leading will spur a new wave of desperate patients and relatives clamouring for chloroquine.
Most doctors opposed any protocols for the use of chloroquine or hydroxychloroquine, but some physicians had pressured local authorities to permit its use, said João Gabbardo, the former No 2 official at Brazil’s health ministry.