There are at least 69 other drugs in the fast track research pipeline currently as potential treatments for COVID-19 - and all of them need to go through rigorous, scientifically-proven methodologies to determine efficacy before being promoted as possible treatments. That’s the way science works.
Trump shot from the hip based on very flimsy, anecdotal evidence and as a result of his reckless endangerment and irresponsibility in singling out and naming chloronique as a “game changer”, at least one person is dead and many more are in danger. Worse yet, instead of taking any responsibility and backing off his claims, he has since doubled-down on the message. This just reinforces the wrong message to rubes who take everything he says as gospel.
Any other leader with even a modicum of awareness would know to avoid making bold projections and hawking miracle cures in front of millions of people who are looking to him for guidance and reassurance. Instead, Trump peddles false hope of a miracle cure despite warnings from medical experts.
While the ultimate responsibility must be placed on any individuals who ingest aquarium cleaner, Trump is at least partially culpable for promoting unproven, untested and dangerous remedies on a national stage to a gullible audience.
“Skillfully combined with a number of other ingredients”… sounds legit!
Thank Teddy Roosevelt for the FDA… Of course, I’m sure that’s on the list of departments the current set of republicans would love to gut, since it’s standing in the way of this kind of innovation.
Trump needs to SHUT THE FUCK UP on what he doesn’t understand. He doesn’t need to promote “cures” that could kill people.
He is going to get people killed with this kind of bullshit. He needs to accept he’s not an expert at everything just because his daddy gave him a small loan of a million dollars. That’s what a president who gave a shit would do, shut up and let the experts talk. Instead we have this brain dead moron with less impulse control than a toddler running the country…
That is, get even more people killed with this kind of bullshit. This isn’t even the first case of chloroquine poisoning following Trump’s initial announcement that the drug was FDA-approved for fighting COVID-19 (it’s not), though it may be the first fatality.
It wasn’t “fish tank cleaner,” it was chloroquine phosphate, the exact same antimalarial drug they’re testing for COVID-19, which is also used to treat fish diseases. The problem was that they took an unprescribed overdose of a non-medical-grade version of the drug Trump touted, not that they drank Clorox. The man would have died if he’d taken ten doctor-prescribed chloroquine pills, too.
Nobody should take fish meds except fish, but if this were the zombie apocalypse doctors would absolutely be hitting the pet stores for antibiotics because fish meds are often just people meds without regulations: somewhat risky, but probably efficacious despite the risks.
I only realized/remembered yesterday that this chemical, or some close variant thereof(?), is also a common additive that we had to be aware of with hermit crabs. They are crazy sensitive to a lot of stuff at sub-anything doses. I understood it in that context to be a preservative, but since we call plant food fertilizer, I guess that’s not surprising.
Not to mention the low therapeutic index of this particular compound, which makes calculations really dodgy anyway (even if you believe that the manufacturer is super accurate about calculating their concentrations…). This has all sorts of NOPE written all over it.
