A plant extract trumpets this week as a “cure” for Covid-19 by the leader of a cash register company is untested and potentially dangerous, scientists say.
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The extract is derived from Nerium oleander, a flowering shrub native to the Mediterranean Sea.
Mike Lindell, CEO of My Pillow and a major donor to President Trump, told Axios that the president was enthusiastic about the drug, called oleandrin, when he heard about it at a White House meeting last month.
“This thing works – it’s the miracle of all time,” Mr. Lindell, who has a financial stake in the company that makes the compound and sits on the board, said in an interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper on Tuesday . When CBS asked Mr. Trump about oleandrin for Covid-19, Mr. Trump said, “We’ll see.”
The unconfirmed claims alarmed scientists. No studies have shown that oleandrin is as safe and effective as a coronavirus treatment. It is unclear what dose the prescribed treatment would have, but picking up even a tiny bit of the poisonous shrub where the compound comes from could kill you, experts say.
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“Do not confuse this plant,” said Cassandra Leah Quave, a medical ethnobotanist at Emory University.
Oleandrin is derived from Nerium oleander, a beautiful, flowering Mediterranean shrub that is popular in landscapes and responsible for many cases of accidental poisoning. Oleandrin is the chemical that kills the plant, wrote Dr. Quave in an article in The Conversation.
If you pick up a part of the plant – or even eat a snail that has previously tampered with some of the leaves – it can cause an irregular heartbeat and kill humans and animals, they and others doctors and scientists said.
So why would anyone think oleandrin could be a treatment for Covid?
It is not uncommon for plants – even poisonous ones – to generate interest as treatments for disease. Robert Harrod, a professor at Southern Methodist University, has studied the potential of oleandrin to combat a type of leukemia, for example. Although Dr. Harrod said that using oleandrin to treat the coronavirus was still nothing more than “an intriguing idea”, he is rooted for it to work.
The U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases conducted a lab test in May to determine whether oleandrin could stop coronavirus infection in cells. The results were “not one-sided”, and the agency decided to stop this line of research, according to Lori Salvatore, an Army spokeswoman for the Army’s medical research and development.
Another self-study, which has not yet been published by a scientific journal, involved two employees of Phoenix Biotechnology, a San Antonio-based company in which Mr. Lindell has an interest. According to their website. the company has spent the last 20 years exploring the health benefits of oleandrin.
The study found that oleandrin could block the coronavirus in monkey cells in a test tube. But these so-called in-vitro experiments do not tell us much, according to scientists, one of whom conducted the study.
“Testing antivirals on cells is only the first step, and promising results should be followed up with animal testing,” said Scott Weaver, a virologist at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, and one of the authors of ‘ the study, in a statement. “There are a lot of drugs like this that look promising on initial tests in vitro, but then fail for various reasons later.”
That study also raises questions about drug safety, said Dr. Melissa Halliday Gittinger, a toxicologist at the Georgia Poison Center and a professor at Emory University School of Medicine. An oil dose as low as 0.02 micrograms per milliliter can be fatal. The paper does not offer a suggested dose for humans, but some of the lab tests on cells were concentrations that were substantially higher.
In his interview with Mr. Cooper on CNN, Mr. Lindell repeatedly stated that oleandrin was shown to be safe in a study of 1,000 people. But that’s misleading: No known study investigating the safety of oleandrin as a treatment for coronavirus like anything else has ever been in such a large group.
Impressed by what Mr. Lindell might have been talking about, Andrew Whitney, vice president and director of Phoenix Biotechnology, said Mr. Lindell was wrong. A company supplied 1,000 cancer patients in Honduras from a medication containing oleandrin on a ‘compassionate’ basis, he said. It was not a controlled study.
Mr. Whitney, who was also present at the White House meeting, said he was nevertheless convinced that oleandrin could safely treat coronavirus because two early clinical trials, both of which used the Phoenix Biotechnology compound, found that it could safely treat cancer patients. However, these studies were small, each involving about 50 people, and did not prove the effectiveness of the drug.
However, Mr Whitney said he was “100 percent sure” that oleandrin was effective in treating the coronavirus because of compelling data in humans. He said it was too early to expand, but confirmed he was referring to a study conducted by Drs. Kim Dunn, an intern in private practice in Houston.
That study was not a strictly controlled clinical trial. In an interview, Drs. Dunn that Phoenix Biotechnology delivered about 200 samples of an extremely low-dose supplement of oleandrin to give to roughly 80 people who were either infected with the coronavirus or living with infected people. Undergraduate students studying medicine were asked to evaluate their impact on the volunteers’ immune system with the help of mentors at the Schull Institute in Houston, she said.
“I still do not know what they found,” said Drs. Dunn, adding that so far no side effects have been identified.
Could Phoenix Biotechnology sell oleandrin as a supplement?
Possibly. And that’s part of why the connection has become a hot topic this week.
Mr. Whitney said he hopes Phoenix Biotechnology will be able to test the drug among people infected with coronavirus in hospitals. But he is also looking to sell the extract as a reluctant diet. Vitamins, pills for weight loss, melatonin and other dietary supplements are not required to go through the review process of drug testing of the Food and Drug Administration to be sold.
If Phoenix Biotechnology sold the product over the counter, it would be prohibited to label oleandrin as a cure for Covid. But scientists are still worried that people will believe it works, especially considering the company’s connections to the Trump administration.
Mr. Lindell is not only the face of My Pillow, but also the honorary president of Trump’s re-election campaign in Minnesota. At a Rose Garden event in March, Mr. Trump introduced him as a “friend.” (“Boy, are you selling those pillows,” the president said.) And Mr. Lindell told CNN that he was friends with Dr. Ben Carson, Secretary of Housing and Urban Development and a member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force. Dr. Carson was also at the oleandrin pitch meeting at the White House in July and is enthusiastic about the drug, according to Axios.
This is not the first time Mr Lindell has been criticized for exaggerating the scientific merits of a product. His company has claimed that his pillows can treat insomnia and apnea during sleep. At one point, the company said in an ad that their pillows were being tested in a randomized and placebo-controlled study. “Clinical sleep study proves ‘78% shows improvement in sleep! ‘”
Following a lawsuit filed by California prosecutors and an investigation by Truthinadvertising.org, the company stopped making those claims. As it turned out, the study did not use placebo control and was not scientifically controlled. There was no evidence that Mr.’s pillows. Lindell was able to treat sleep disorders.
When asked about this suit on CNN, Mr Lindell said: “I am under attack with terrible lawsuits that I had to settle because I had the support of the greatest president this country has ever in history has seen. “
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