President Donald Trump said other countries have provided excellent reports on hydroxychloroquine. (File)
Washington:
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration on Monday revoked its emergency use authorization for hydroxychloroquine to treat COVID-19, but was quickly criticized by President Donald Trump, who said that only agencies Americans had not understood its advantage in the fight against the coronavirus.
Based on new evidence, the FDA has stated that it is no longer reasonable to believe that hydroxychloroquine and the related drug chloroquine may be effective in treating the disease caused by the new coronavirus.
The FDA has also warned that the drugs have shown in laboratory studies that they interfere with the antiviral remdesivir from Gilead Sciences Inc – the only drug to date that has shown any benefit against COVID-19 in formal clinical trials.
The move comes after several studies of decades-old antimalarial pills have suggested that they are not effective in treating or preventing COVID-19.
Earlier this month, British scientists halted a large trial after deciding that hydroxychloroquine was “useless” to treat COVID-19 patients.
The anti-inflammatory and antiviral properties of hydroxychloroquine suggest it could help COVID-19 patients, and the FDA authorized its emergency use in March at the height of a pandemic for which there was no approved treatment.
The initial enthusiasm was partly based on laboratory experiments in which the drug appeared to neutralize the virus. Chloroquine, which is not approved for use in the United States and has more side effects, has not stood up better in human clinical trials.
In March Trump declared that hydroxychloroquine in combination with the antibiotic azithromycin had “a real chance of being one of the greatest game changers in the history of medicine”, with little evidence to support this. affirmation.
He later said he took the medication as a preventative after two people who worked at the White House were diagnosed with COVID-19, and urged others to try it.
“I took it and it felt good to take it. I don’t know if it had an impact, but it certainly didn’t hurt me,” Trump said on Monday.
Trump said there had been “big reports” from France, Spain and other places, without providing any further evidence or explanation. France is one of the countries that has already stopped using the drug for COVID-19 patients.
US Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar said the drug is still being studied for possible use at an earlier stage of the disease.
“Much of the data that was published and which was more negative concerned very sick people in the hospital,” he said.
The drug can still be used with a doctor’s prescription, noted Azar. Any drug approved by the United States can be used in any way the doctor sees fit, regardless of what it was approved for.
THE USE OF DRUGS ALREADY DECLINING
In recent weeks, doctors have already backed down on the use of hydroxychloroquine for COVID-19, after several studies suggesting that it is not effective and may pose cardiac risks for some patients.
The Infectious Diseases Society of America on Monday supported the FDA’s decision to “revoke the emergency use authorization for hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine”.
Half of the hospitals that responded to a mid-May survey by the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists (ASHP) reported an excess supply of hydroxychloroquine which they expected to find from wholesalers .
Current US government treatment guidelines do not recommend its use for COVID-19 patients outside of a clinical trial.
At the end of last month, France, Italy and Belgium discontinued the use of hydroxychloroquine for patients with COVID-19. But the United States sent 2 million doses last month to Brazil, which has become the last epicenter of the pandemic.
Hundreds of trials testing hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine as interventions for COVID-19 are still in progress, including an American study designed to show whether hydroxychloroquine in combination with azithromycin can prevent hospitalization and the death of COVID-19.
(With the exception of the title, this story was not edited by GalacticGaming staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
