It's Wednesday. I'm Oscar Ramirez from the Daily Dive podcast in Los Angeles, and this is your daily coronavirus update. President Trump caused a stir when he announced that he is taking hydroxy chloroquin as a protection against coronavirus. He said he began taking it right around the time that news broke that two White House staffers had tested positive
for COVID nineteen. While the drug has been around for a long time, there is no proof that it prevents someone from contracting the virus, and there are concerns about side effects. Lenny Bernstein, health and medicine reporter at the Washington Post, joins us for more. Thanks for joining us, Lenny, thanks for having me back. I wanted to bring you
on to talk about President Trump. He caused the stir on Monday when he announced that he's taking the drug hydroxy chloroquin along with a zinc supplement as protection against the coronavirus. Obviously, we know the backstory with hydroxy chloroquine. The President was pushing really hard for it. The f d A let doctors prescribe it to their patients in hopes that it can help treat it. But we've had some studies that show that it really provides no benefit there.
So when the President said he was taking it right away, everybody went into a tizzy about it. Let me tell us some more about it. As you said, there is no evidence that hydroxy chloroquine helps prevent or treat COVID nineteen. There are some studies that actually show that it may have a little bit more tendency to endanger you if you take this then if you don't take it. So this is again the president sort of defying medical wisdom. He's wants to do and to go with his instincts.
He's got his intuition, whatever it is you'd like to call it. That is his right. Doctors can prescribe this off label, although the FDA does not want them to do that. But it is problematic because he is such an example for the country and everything he does is covered so intensely that many people worry that there will be a clamor in the public to get this medication. That's what happened the first time around, when he was pushing pretty hard for it. Prescriptions rose quite a bit.
Also when he suggested that disinfectant might prove a possible treatment for the virus. When he suggested that you be able to object infectant into your lungs and get rid of the virus, there was actually a surge in calls to poison control centers about whether or not that was an idea. So everything the President set is so widely disseminated, especially in the midst of a crisis like this, that there's a great deal of concern. Now what are the concerns?
Number one, if you have hard issues, this can be dangerous for you. The medication can goes a rather dangerous arrhythmia that will throw at the beating of your heart out of whack. So that's one thing. And if you haven't had any KG and your doctor hasn't examined you, I don't know what other medications you're on, it could be dangerous. But the other thing is that this medication is a legitimate treatment for lupus and saw autoimmune disaands and if there's a run on it, those folks may
find that they can't obtain it. So what happened after this, too is the White House went into overdrive kind of defending the decision. There. They brought out the Press Secretary to say, you can only get hydroxy clerquin in consultation with your doctor. You need a prescription for it, so it's not like people can just get it really nearly
out and about. So this brought into the conversation the White House physicians Sean P. Conley, and he actually had to put out a statement saying that he had numerous discussions with the president for and against its use, and they said that the potential benefit outweighed the relative risks. Now, he said he started taking it maybe about a week and a half ago, and that's when we were getting reports that a few other people in the White House
there had contracted COVID nineteen. So I guess that's what they meant by the potential benefit, right if if the virus had gotten into the White House and the President was potentially exposed, they thought to the selves, why not put the president on this will keep an eye on him. Maybe doesn't have these kinds of predispositions too hard a rhythmy is that other people would have to worry about. I don't really know, we've never really been told about that.
So yeah, they did a risk benefit analysis of a guy who really wanted to take this, and they decided, okay, they could do it safely, but that may not be true of everybody else. So you have to exercise abundant caution not to get yourself into a situation where you might have a hard rhythmy you and your doctor. The other interesting thing about this, just a sort of a little bit on the side, is that Dr Connelly never actually said that the patient is taking it, even though
the President himself has admitted it. I suspect that's because hip h privacy laws prevent him from saying anything as I think about what a patient of his is taking. But it did create a little bit of a fudge factor, a little bit of a vagueness about what the President had said exactly. And it's unfortunate because a lot of this has become very political. And then you also get Nancy Pelosi saying, oh, he shouldn't be taken this because of his age group and and his weight group, and
should call morbidly OBEs. You get all this stuff rolled into it, and it just amplifies the rest of the story. But I didn't want to ask one particular thing because President Trump said that he's taking hydroxy chloric quin as long as a zinc supplement, and that's an important part of it too, because up until then it was either hydroxy chloric quin by itself or with the antibiotic azethromycin. So this is kind of a slightly different dosage that
he's taking. There is again some belief among some people that zinc may help you. It's not proven, and so the president's attitude on these substances is, you know, what the heck, what do you have to lose? And you do have something to lose from taking hydroxy chloric quin indiscriminately with zinc. I don't think there's a whole lot of danger. It's not proven to do anything for you.
But the President again is saying, well, we're in a crisis, and in the absence of proof that it doesn't, in the absence of proof that it's gonna harm me, I might as well take it. And that's not really great medical science. It's not the way doctors approached their jobs the care and treatment of patients in any regard. So it's his philosophy. He's allowed to do it. A lot of people are just concerned about the example he's setting.
Lenny Bernstein, health and medicine reporter at the Washington Post, thank you very much for joining us. Oh you bet. Thank you for having me. I'm Astar Ramirez and this has been your daily coronavirus update. Don't forget that. For today's big news stories, you can check me out on the Daily Dive podcast every Monday to Friday, so follow us on I Heart Radio or wherever you get your podcast