Abbey Mahler criticizes About the challenges facing Donald Trump and Elon Musk People who need hydroxychloroquine to treat lupus. Early in the Covid pandemic, Trump and Musk promoted the drug as a Covid cure, leading to widespread shortages that made it difficult for people like Mahler to get the medicine they need. “What Trump did couldn’t have happened without Elon,” Mahler said. Mother Jones.
Mahler, who lives in Los Angeles, has been using TikTok for nearly four years to address misinformation about hydroxychloroquine, which was originally created to prevent and treat malaria and can be used for lupus, vasculitis and a variety of other autoimmune diseases. Sjögren’s syndrome. When I heard that hydroxychloroquine was being prescribed for COVID-19 patients, I wasn’t too worried at first. Could the drugs they already need and use also treat COVID-19?
“I vividly remember joking around with my friends,” Mahler said. “It’s like, ‘Haha, I’m going to live forever.’”
On March 16, 2020 (just days after Trump declared COVID-19 a national emergency), Musk published a Google document claiming that HCQ and a related drug called chloroquine, as it is commonly known, could help fight COVID-19. I tweeted a link. The Google Doc itself doesn’t contain any notable statistics. “For C19, it might be worth considering chloroquine,” Musk said on Twitter, adding, “Hydroxychloroquine might be better.” (In what turned out to be dark and accurate foreshadowing, Musk posted another tweet warning that “if we over-allocate medical resources to COVID, it will come at the expense of treating other diseases.”)
A few days later, another study was published as a preprint, meaning it has not yet been peer reviewed. From a scientific standpoint, the evidence from the study was thin. The paper found that 12 of the 24 people studied (excluding the control group) benefited from HCQ 7 days after being diagnosed with COVID-19. Researchers also acknowledged that six of the patients had to stop taking HCQ after their health symptoms worsened.
Experts later concluded that hydroxychloroquine was not actually useful in preventing or treating COVID-19. But infectious disease expert Michael Saag wrote: JAMA Network According to a November 2020 editorial, desperation in the face of a spreading pandemic helped create the perfect storm that helped early HCQ research gain traction.
These findings, along with the urgency of clinicians providing care to patients with potentially fatal disorders for which there is no cure, hint at the possible benefits, and despite a lack of rigorous evidence, they should raise doubts about the increased use of hydroxychloroquine for COVID-19 patients. I contributed without fail. For efficacy.
The sudden surge in demand for HCQ was accompanied by price increases for the drug’s key ingredients. Less than a week after Musk’s tweet, Mahler had to visit multiple pharmacies to get HCQ and had to pay $60 instead of the usual $15. Unlike many people with lupus, she couldn’t live without it, but over the next few months she had to ration it, sometimes taking half doses to cope with the shortage.
Gregory Rigano, Laura Ingraham, a lawyer who is one of the authors of Google Doc Musk fox news Write a program the same day Musk tweeted. Ingraham himself later explained to Trump in a private meeting in early April how great HCQ was against COVID-19. (The Trump campaign team and Musk did not respond to recent requests for comment. mother jones.) As Saag writes:
On April 4, the U.S. president “followed his gut” and promoted the drug as a potential treatment and authorized the U.S. government to purchase and stockpile 29 million pills of hydroxychloroquine for use by COVID-19 patients. Of note, no U.S. government health officials have approved the use of hydroxychloroquine due to a lack of hard data and concerns about side effects.
like statistics news According to reports at the time, President Trump interrupted then-National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci from answering a question about the drug’s efficacy at a White House briefing. In May 2020, Trump proudly announced that he was taking hydroxychloroquine to prevent COVID-19, despite the FDA’s statement weeks earlier that it should not be used against COVID-19 outside of hospitals or clinical trials.
But “ironically,” Saag wrote, Trump “did not receive hydroxychloroquine” when he actually contracted severe COVID-19 and was hospitalized.
It makes good medical sense. Trump’s praise for HCQ did not include the disclosure that it may have serious side effects, such as heart problems and vision changes. Many patients taking hydroxychloroquine, including myself, need to be screened regularly for HCQ-related vision problems. It is difficult to know how prevalent the complication is in 2020.
“As soon as President Trump started talking, it became clear that things were going to get worse quickly,” Mahler said. In mid-May, I had to argue with my health insurance company to avoid paying more than $100 for a drug that was previously quite affordable.
A survey by the Lupus Research Alliance found that one-third of lupus patients had difficulty filling their HCQ prescriptions between March and May 2020. This can mean serious complications, including hospitalization, where Covid transmission often occurs. Trump’s claims about hydroxychloroquine are not just another example of farce, Mahler says, but a source of real harm to people’s lives.
@babs_zone It’s time to hold some people accountable. #HCQRewind #HerStory #CrowdCheers #hydroxychloroquine #DisabilityJustice #lupus #hcq #disabilitytiktok #fyp ♬ Drive Forever – Remix – Sergio Valentino
HCQ shortages have also become more common outside the United States. A February 2021 study found new anxiety about this shortage among European lupus patients. During the first year of the pandemic.
I am now taking hydroxychloroquine, although I wasn’t at the time, and I remember watching in horror as word spread that the anti-inflammatory colchicine I was taking would be the next Covid treatment proposed by Trump. I remember asking my rheumatologist at the time if he was worried that something like that would happen. She said there’s no evidence that it will help, but there isn’t much evidence that HCQ will help either. Trump never embraced colchicine, but the hydroxychloroquine shortage touched a nerve.
In mid-June 2020, the FDA ended its study of HCQ and COVID-19. Results show it doesn’t help. Weeks later, Trump called hydroxychloroquine a “COVID cure” and gave reasons why we should not wear it. mask. Trump is sorely wrong, high-quality masks help prevent the continued spread of Covid-19.
Saag, an infectious disease expert, concluded:
The clear, unambiguous, and compelling lesson of the hydroxychloroquine story for the medical community and the public is that science and politics do not mix. Science, by definition, requires diligence and honest evaluation of research results. Not so much about politics.
