President Trump and the top government infectious disease expert were not on the same page about the promise of possible coronavirus therapies in Friday’s White House press update.
Trump said that he had high hopes for the possibility that the malaria drug chloroquine would be a viable treatment option, which he had announced Thursday that the Food and Drug Administration was considering as a therapy for COVID-19.
“Maybe there is. Maybe there isn’t,” Trump said when asked if there could be a cure to the coronavirus. “It may work. It may not work. I feel good about it.”
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National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci clarified that evidence for the drug working to treat viruses was “anecdotal.”
“There really isn’t that much of a difference in many respects with what we’re saying,” Fauci said. “The president feels optimistic about something, his feeling about it. … What I’m saying is it might be effective.”
Fauci said that, as a scientist, he wanted to rely solely on evidence that the drug can work for the coronavirus as well as it works to treat and prevent malaria.
“We’re trying to strike a balance between making something with a potential of an effect to the American people available. At the same time, we do it under the auspices of the protocol that would give us information to determine if it’s truly safe and truly effective,” Fauci said.
After a reporter claimed that the drug had been “fairly effective against SARS,” Fauci warned that “you’ve got to be careful” about saying the drug was effective, as it was not tested in a clinical trial.
“The information that you’re referring to specifically is anecdotal: It was not done in a clinical trial, so you can’t make a definitive statement about it,” he said.
Trump, saying that he “comes from a very positive school,” added that a new treatment could be on the horizon, and chloroquine has already been established as a safe and effective treatment for malaria. He said that pharmaceutical companies are shipping “millions of units” of the drug for physicians to prescribe to coronavirus patients but that it still isn’t certain whether the drug will work to treat the specific virus.
“We’ll see what happens,” Trump said. “And we’ll use it on people that aren’t doing great.”
Trump touted chloroquine as “approved or very close to approved” in Thursday’s press briefing, causing FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn to add that it has not yet been proved as a viable coronavirus treatment. The drug, first created in the 1940s, has been used to treat and prevent malaria, arthritis, and lupus. It has not, though, been proven effective in treating or preventing viral infections.
