Coronavirus: Drug hydroxycholoroquine increases death risk
Hydroxychloroquine, an anti-malarial drug President Trump encouraged as a treatment for covid-19 patients, is not only ineffective but significantly increases the risk of death for some, new evidence suggests.
“Alarmed by a growing cache of data linking the anti-malaria drug to serious cardiac problems, some drug safety experts are now calling for even more forceful action by the government to discourage its use,” The Washington Post reported.
But hydroxychloroquine has already become a cure-all in the minds of some Americans who hoarded it. This week an anti-quarantine protester in Long Island pursued a local news reporter trying to keep his distance. “I’ve got hydroxychloroquine, I’m fine!” the man said.
Trump has stopped talking about hydroxychloroquine and moved on to promoting a White House effort to invent, test and manufacture coronavirus vaccines for hundreds of millions of people by January. The president unveiled his “Operation Warp Speed” program on Friday, but scientists are skeptical it can deliver so quickly, when vaccines typically take years to make. “The leading candidates in the U.S. effort so far are an experiment in every sense of the word, drawing on exciting new technologies that have never before been used in an approved vaccine,” The Post reported.
In somewhat more encouraging scientific news, new research from Harvard and MIT suggests that warm, humid summer weather will slow the virus's spread. But it won't halt it — “even in summer, most people live their lives indoors,” The Post's health desk noted in a story on the findings — and any summertime decline in infections could be followed by a resurgence in the fall.
Many states attempting to reopen their economies have no “circuit breakers” in their plans — no benchmarks that would require them to reimpose restrictions if infections spike. That's already proving problematic in Texas, which reported its highest single-day death toll two weeks after it began to reopen. Read our story to see which states lack contingency plans.
