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Online demand for the antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine increased by more than 1,000% after Donald Trump approved it as a potential treatment for Covid-19 without providing evidence that it worked, according to a new study.
There are no proven prescription therapies to treat Covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus. Despite lack of evidence, presidential support increased Online searches to buy hydroxychloroquine, and its chemical cousin chloroquine, at 1,389% and 442% respectively.
Internet searches remained high, investigators said, even after NBC News reported that an American couple had accidentally poisoned themselves by drinking a liquid containing chloroquine to treat parasites in fish tanks, after a Trump press conference. in which he promoted the drug.
“We know that high-profile endorsements are important in advertising, so it stands to reason that these endorsements can stimulate people to search for these medications,” said Michael Liu, a graduate student at Oxford University and the first author of the study, in a statement.
The research was published as a letter in the Journal of the American Medical Association Internal Medicine. The authors analyzed the prevalence of Internet searches using the terms “buy”, “order”, “Amazon”, “eBay” or “Walmart” in combination with “hydroxychloroquine” or “chloroquine”.
The researchers examined searches before and after two notable endorsements, the first on March 16 by tech billionaire Elon Musk, who tweeted about chloroquine, and the second on March 19 by Trump, who approved hydroxychloroquine in combination with the Azithromycin antibiotic at a press conference.
“The first and largest increase in searches corresponded directly to Musk’s tweet and Trump’s first televised endorsements,” the authors wrote. “These changes represent about 93,000 and 96,000 more searches than expected for chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine, respectively, with 216,000 total searches for both drugs in just 14 days.”
“Musk and Trump’s endorsements are especially problematic for three reasons,” Liu said. “First, these treatments have inconclusive clinical efficacy. Second, these medications have potentially fatal side effects. Third, chloroquine-containing products, such as aquarium cleaner, are commercially available to the public without a prescription. “
The misinformation about health is generally considered to come from “unreliable health sources, online trolls and bots,” said Dr. Mark Dredze, study co-author and associate professor at Johns Hopkins University, in a release. “It is rare to have erroneous health information from such high-profile figures.”
Since the backing of Trump and Musk, the US Food and Drug Administration. USA It has issued a warning about the life-threatening heart side effects associated with chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine.
The warning came after a small Brazilian study was stopped by safety advisers, because patients treated with a high dose of chloroquine appeared to die at twice the rate of those treated with a lower dose of the drug.
Despite the dangers to the public, Trump has made other potentially harmful suggestions for treatments, including disinfectant injection. The strange comment prompted several disinfection companies and Harvard experts to urge people: “Please don’t inject bleach or disinfectant.”
The authors of the research called on pharmaceutical and government companies to start “actively mitigating the negative consequences of this misinformation” and for Google and other Internet companies to expand education efforts.
“The FDA and other agencies are there to protect public health interests, and they need to be there now,” said John Ayers, a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Diego.
“We found that hundreds of thousands of people were motivated to go out and try to buy these products online,” he said. “They didn’t know, they weren’t interested, they were trying to buy it.”
Despite concerns, doctors began “widely” prescribing the drugs. That lawsuit has led to a shortage of patients already taking the medications, predominantly women and people of color with autoimmune conditions, according to an editorial accompanying the research.
“Given the cost of COVID-19, the pressure to do something is huge and understandable,” Colette DeJong and Robert Wachter, MD, of the University of California, San Francisco department of medicine, wrote in a related article. “But that should not prompt doctors to get rid of the principles of evidence-based medicine and the warning not to harm.”
