A drug President Donald Trump backed as a possible “game changer” in the fight against the coronavirus pandemic received an emergency-use designation from U.S. regulators, even as signs of risk continued to mount.
The Health and Human Services Department accepted 30 million doses of the drug, hydroxychloroquine, from Novartis AG’s Sandoz unit, Secretary Alex Azar said in a statement late Sunday.
Normally used to treat malaria, hydroxychloroquine yielded promising yet inconclusive results in a small coronavirus trial. While Trump has said the drug is safe, it does carry significant side effects. Some people have been sickened, with reported deaths in the U.S. and France, after taking various versions to try to ward off the new illness.
Trump said 1,100 patients in New York City are getting treatment using hydroxychloroquine. As global cases surged past 700,000, the city has emerged as one of the pandemic’s hot spots.
“Let’s see how it works,” Trump said in his daily briefing Sunday. “It may, it may not.”
Some Covid-19 patients treated at French hospitals with hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine, another malaria drug, experienced fatal heart side effects, Le Point reported. Australian health officials have restricted the use of the two drugs for treatment of Covid-19, the illness caused by coronavirus.
WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has also cautioned against the use of unproven treatments against coronavirus.
