Posted March 27, 2020
On March 16, 2020, US President Donald Trump announced during a press conference that chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine have shown “encouraging early results [against the coronavirus],” and that “we’re going to be able to make that drug available almost immediately.” The statement was later clarified by US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Commissioner Stephen Hahn, MD, who said that chloroquine was “already approved for the treatment of malaria, as well as an arthritis condition. That’s a drug that the president has directed us to take a closer look at, as to whether an expanded use approach to that could be done to actually see if that benefits patients. And again, we want to do that in the setting of a clinical trial, a large pragmatic clinical trial to actually gather that information and answer the question that needs to be answered. Read more.