After Trump suggests hydroxychloroquine as potential COVID-19 cure, lupus patients face shortages
In the last week, this once obscure drug has been thrust into the national spotlight with everyone from doctors, to laypeople, to the U.S. president weighing in. The attention has so dramatically driven up demand that pharmacists are reporting depleted stocks of the drug, leaving many of the roughly 1.5 million lupus patients across the country unable to get their prescriptions filled. They now face an uncertain future as the public clings to one of the first signs of hope to appear since the coronavirus began sweeping across the U.S.
But scientists and physicians caution that this hope is based on studies that have been conducted outside of traditional scientific timelines. "The paper is interesting and certainly would warrant future more definitive studies," Jeff Sparks, a rheumatologist and researcher at Harvard Medical School, said of the French study. "It might even be enough data to use the regimen off-label for sick and hospitalized patients.
"However," he added, "it does not prove that the regimen actually works."
This has not stopped widespread promotion of the drug cocktail — including by U.S. President Donald Trump, who has helped to stoke demand for hydroxychloroquine by invoking it during his daily coronavirus press briefings. In a tweet on Saturday, the president described the regimen as possibly one of the "biggest game changers in the history of medicine." (Anthony Fauci, the infectious disease expert spearheading the U.S. response to the coronavirus pandemic, called the evidence for the treatment anecdotal. "You really can't make any definitive statement about it," he told reporters Saturday.)
Despite efforts to pin blame for the shortages on Trump alone, however, hydroxychloroquine scarcity was already setting in weeks ago, as doctors began responding on their own to percolating and preliminary research. Some evidence suggests that many doctors are now writing prescriptions prophylactically for patients with no known illness — as well as for themselves and family members — prompting at least one state pharmacy board to call an emergency meeting, scheduled for Sunday morning. The board planned to bar pharmacists from dispensing chloroquine or hydroxychloroquine for anyone other than confirmed Covid-19 patients without approval of the board's director.
https://www.salon.com/2020/03/28/after-trump-suggests-hydroxychloroquine-as-potential-covid-19-cure-lupus-patients-face-shortages_partner/
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