Trump pushes hydroxychloroquine to treat coronavirus. But what are the side effects?
President Donald Trump started looking to speed up testing on antiviral therapies like hydroxychloroquine as a possible coronavirus treatment in mid-March.
Less than two weeks later, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration had issued emergency authorization of hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine — similar drugs used to treat malaria and lupus — for use in coronavirus patients without access to a clinical trial.
“I’m not a doctor,” Trump said in a White House press briefing Tuesday in response to a question on hydroxychloroquine. “I’m just saying, we hear great results.”
The reporter had asked about the drug’s potential side effects — a topic of growing concern among doctors worried officials have glossed over possible adverse reactions in their haste to push the drug out.
“The side effects? The side effects are the least of it,” Trump said Tuesday. “You have people dying all over the place.”
Some medical experts disagree.
In Sweden, hospitals stopped giving chloroquine to coronavirus patients following reports of adverse side effects such as vision loss, cramping and headaches “that felt like stepping into a high voltage plant,” Newsweek reported.
According to the U.S. National Library of Medicine, other side effects range from mild — such as dizziness, nausea and diarrhea — to severe — including sensitivity to light, bleeding, muscle weakness, hair loss and convulsions.
There’s also a rare but sometimes lethal side effect for people susceptible to heart conditions: “drug-induced sudden cardiac death,” NBC News reported.
The Mayo Clinic has issued guidelines that specifically mention hydroxychloroquine, which can effect what they call “the heart’s electrical recharging system.”
“This interference increases the possibility that the heart’s rhythm could degenerate into dangerous erratic heart beats, resulting ultimately in sudden cardiac death,” according to the Mayo Clinic.
Dr. Michael Ackerman, a genetic cardiologist who is director of the Mayo Clinic’s Windland Smith Rice Genetic Heart Rhythm Clinic, told NBC that hydroxychloroquine “is likely to be safe for 90 percent of the population.”
“But really safe in a population sense doesn’t mean that drug is going to be safe enough for the particular patient I’m about to treat,” he said, according to NBC.
