Former presidential candidate and U.S. senator from California, Kamala Harris took to The View recently to give her thoughts on President Donald Trump pushing the anti-malaria and lupus drug hydroxychloroquine as a miracle treatment for COVID-19.
“The president keeps taking the stage and as opposed
to what Dr. [Anthony] Fauci and medical health professionals are telling us, pushing this drug,” Harris said on The View. “He’s got to stop — he’s not — we don’t want a drug pusher for president.”Trump has been touting the drug during his daily press conferences concerning the coronavirus outbreak in the United States.
“I certainly understand why the president is pushing it,” Dr. Joshua Rosenberg of Brooklyn Hospital Center said in a Times article on Monday. “He’s the president of the United States. He has to project hope….So I’m not faulting him for pushing it even if there isn’t a lot of science behind it, because it is, at this point, the best, most available option for use.”
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the American physician and immunologist who has served as the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases since 1984, who frequently joins Trump and Vice President Mike
Pence at coronavirus press conferences, has repeatedly said that all reports of the successful treatments of COVID patients with hydroxychloroquine are anecdotal and have not been proven successful by a peer-reviewed scientific study.“I think we’ve got to be careful that we don’t make that majestic leap to assume that this is a knockout drug,” Fauci told Fox News on Friday. “We still need to do the kinds of studies that definitively prove whether any intervention, not just this one, any intervention is truly safe and effective.”
In New York State, doctors have been treating patients with hydroxychloroquine, but also caution about the expectations of successful treatment.
“There has been anecdotal evidence that it is promising,” Cuomo told reporters while noting the drug’s effectiveness has not yet been scientifically proven.