The World Health Organization (WHO) announced over the weekend that they're halting all of their clinical trials of Trump's fake miracle for the coronavirus, hydroxychloroquine, because it clearly doesn't work.
But hydroxychloroquine doesn't just not work; it's actually more likely to kill you than the novel coronavirus is. And while we already knew that based on a relatively small sample size from the Department of Veteran's Affairs hospital system, the medical journal The Lancet published a review of 96,000 patients that showed higher death rates.
The WHO's chief scientist, Dr. Soumya Swaminathan, says the review was prompted by the article in The Lancet, which was not a randomized control trial but still large.
"While it was still a reporting of observational data," Swaminathan says, distinguishing it from the gold-standard randomized controlled trial, "it came from multiple registries and quite a large number of patients, 96,000 patients." She says the WHO hasn't yet seen data that showed a problem with hydroxychloroquine in its own study, but The Lancet article raised questions among many of the investigators involved in the WHO's trial.
In closely related news, Trump now says he's not taking hydroxychloroquine anymore.
“Finished, just finished,” he said in an interview that aired on Sinclair Broadcasting on Sunday. “And by the way, I’m still here.” [...]
“Well, I've heard tremendous reports about it. Frankly, I've heard tremendous reports. Many people think it saved their lives. Doctors come out with reports. You had a study in France, you had a study in Italy that were incredible studies,” Trump said, failing to acknowledge the studies that tied the drug to a greater risk of death or those that found no benefit at all.
I truly do not believe Trump was ever taking hydroxychloroquine, but the damage has been done in any case.
There are quite literally people who have died because the "President of the United States" hyped a fake cure that he heard about from his television.
It's kind of like your uncle telling you to take colloidal silver or iodine because he saw it on InfoWars, but deadlier, and it's the president telling the entire world to take it.
The WHO's statements have been worded very carefully and I assume that's an effort to avoid another public fight with Trump, but I doubt they'll be resuming their trials.