I thought separating families and putting kids in cages was the worst thing Trump has done. This is very stiff competition for that title:
On March 19, as President Donald Trump was in the White House briefing room hailing a drug known as hydroxychloroquine as a “game changer,” 57-year-old Sheila Staten was in Froedtert Hospital, struggling to breathe.
Hydroxychloroquine would not be a game changer for Staten. The Milwaukee resident died six days later of heart and kidney failure, hooked up to a ventilator and swollen beyond recognition.
Staten, the fifth person in Milwaukee County to die from COVID-19, was one of thousands of people across the country who were given the antimalarial drug in the early months of the pandemic as Trump and many of his supporters extolled its virtues.
But as prescriptions for hydroxychloroquine boomed, reports of serious adverse events linked to the drug during the first half of the year more than doubled, according to a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel analysis of newly released data from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s adverse events reporting system.
That’s despite the fact that overall adverse event reports for all drugs remained flat.
In the first half of 2019, the FDA recorded 3,251 adverse events where the patient was taking hydroxychloroquine — also known by its brand name Plaquenil — or the related drug chloroquine. More than 2,441 of the reports were deemed “serious” because they included outcomes such as hospitalization, disability or death.
In the first half of 2020, the number of adverse events involving the drugs jumped to 6,588, including 6,233 that were deemed “serious.”
Meanwhile, reports of patient deaths that involved hydroxychloroquine, chloroquine or Plaquenil nearly quadrupled, from 75 to 293. Of the 293 deaths, more than half listed COVID-19 as a reason for using the medication.
The reports likely represent only a fraction of the true problem. The FDA’s largely voluntary system has been plagued by substantial underreporting and has been the subject of several critical U.S. General Accountability Office examinations dating back to the 1970s.
Now that hydroxychloroquine and dozens of other drugs are being repurposed as potential COVID-19 remedies, there are doubts about whether health regulators can accurately track the potential damage caused by the drugs.
The numbers show a remarkable increase in reports of deaths, said Michael Carome, a physician and director of the health research group of Public Citizen, a patient advocacy and watchdog organization.
Carome, a former FDA advisory committee member, said the increases were due to the “reckless promotion” of the drugs by President Trump.
Here’s a little trip down memory lane:
Those are just a few of the numerous instances where the president hyped this drug.
We know that tens of thousands of people are dead that shouldn’t be because of Trump’s ignorance and incompetence in leading the country in this crisis. But this is something else again. It is specifically tied to his promotion of this drug based on Fox News and wishful thinking so that he could “get it over with” and go back to his one true love: rallies.
I don’t know how many people died because of Trump’s insane desire to play scientist. But it would appear that it’s more than died on 9/11.
Someone should have to pay for this. I’m sure the temporary king …. er, the president is immune because he seems to be immune from everything. But what about Laura Ingraham and her crew, who are still pimping this drug despite everything? Is there no legal remedy for selling snake oil on national TV?
Or maybe this guy? It was just this week: