The US Food and Drug Administration has (it seems almost begrudgingly) issued an emergency authorization to allow Hydroxychloroquine and Chloroquine to be prescribed to treat COVID-19 patients.
Related: The Murray Model – New Hampshire Shutdown to Continue At Least Into June.
The agency allowed for the drugs to be “donated to the Strategic National Stockpile to be distributed and prescribed by doctors to hospitalized teen and adult patients with COVID-19, as appropriate, when a clinical trial is not available or feasible,” HHS said in a statement, announcing that Sandoz donated 30 million doses of hydroxychloroquine to the stockpile and Bayer donated 1 million doses of chloroquine.
We shared research two weeks ago conducted by Doctors and Universities (including some in the US) that claimed significant successes when treating COVID-19 patients with chloroquine. A French trial produced results this weekend involving 80-patients all but two of whom showed excellent clinical improvement.
The politico piece has no room for any of that. What did they want us to know? That the President, investors, advisers, and guests on Fox News have advocated for the drug.
But wait, says Politico,
- Career scientists have been skeptical of the effort, noting the lack of data on the drugs’ efficacy for coronavirus care…
- [They are] worried that it would siphon medication away from patients who need it for other conditions.
- a growing number of lupus and arthritis patients have complained that they’ve been unable to full their prescriptions amid ongoing shortages.
- reports have emerged that some physicians are hoarding the drug for themselves.
- Federal officials also have privately complained that Trump’s focus on anti-malaria drugs has distracted from efforts to investigate more promising therapies,
- and several scientists immediately panned the announcement.
That high rate of contagion must not move these “career scientists” to reevaluate their risk-reward calculus. They are concerned about what, side-effects? We’ve been putting Chloroquine into human beings since the mid to late 1940s. And while there are a lot of potential side-effects, and a few that are less than pleasant, none of them is death.
As for distractions from other therapies, where? Who? Every day I’m reading about improved tests and potential therapies whose single biggest barrier to deployment would be what? Career bureaucrats, who may also be career scientists? You know, the ones Politico called for this article. The folks whose jobs depend on the interference of extensive trials regardless of the immediacy of the circumstance.
They are probably still pissed off at the push to allow chronically ill patients the “Right to Try.”
How dare you let free people faced with the likelihood of death make choices about their own quality of life with the time they have left.
If you want to end your life, they are all in. If you want to risk extending it, wait just one damn minute. We need a few more years to test this treatment – it could kill you!
For the record, I’m not all-in on the libertarian view that people should be allowed to put whatever they want into their bodies. The assumption that this harms no one else is ignorant and absurd. There is a long list of things (yes, including alcohol) whose use can have significant (and sometimes lasting) impacts on family, friends, co-workers, and total strangers. But in the case of a mentally capable adult, their family, and the doctor, their treatment is up to them.
And so it should be with Chloroquine. It won’t be right for everyone. In some cases, pneumonia may be too far advanced for it to be of any use. But keeping it off the table when other countries have had success is petty and stupid.
