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Nevada, via executive order, this week banned prescriptions of the drugs for the coronavirus until the results of rigorous clinical trials are known.
“We must deal with facts, not fiction,” Nevada’s chief state medical officer, Ishan Azzam, said. Nevada is among states trying to stop runs and hoarding that have depleted supply for people who need the treatments for established uses, including lupus patients. New York’s Cuomo in an executive order has also limited new prescriptions of the anti-malarial drugs to patients with previously approved FDA conditions and to coronavirus patients participating in state-sponsored experiments.
Despite some tantalizing early results, there is scant published evidence that the two anti-malarial drugs will have a benefit for coronavirus patients. More rigorous controlled clinical trials are being conducted in the United States, including in New York and Minnesota, and around the world to prove whether the drugs will work. Anthony S. Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, has repeatedly cautioned, from the same White House lectern as Trump, that indications of benefit so far are anecdotal.
But in the absence of viable alternatives, there has been a global rush to try the drugs. Doctors and hospitals have virtually wiped out U.S. supplies by prescribing them “off label."
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Since the start of the coronavirus outbreak, Zelenko, 46, has shared material on Facebook suggesting that the virus may have been deliberately developed by China as a population control device and that its threat was exaggerated by Democrats.
Zelenko acknowledged the drugs could have side effects. “They’re not candy,” he said. “However, this is an unprecedented health crisis, the world’s under attack, this is battlefield medicine.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/03/26/trump-keeps-touting-an-unproven-coronavirus-treatment-its-now-being-tested-thousands-new-york/
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