Attorney general Bill Barr complains about a media ‘jihad’ against unproven malaria drug touted by Donald Trump despite fresh concerns over its safety with Sweden scaling back use
- Attorney General Bill Barr lashed out at the news media for skeptically reporting on the malaria drug hydroxchloroquine
- President Trump has touted the malaria drug as a ‘game-changer’ and said he might even take it
- But in Sweden doctors are backing off on using either chloroquine of hydroxchloroquine due to side effects they’re seeing in patients
- The drugs are close relatives, though hydroxchloroquine is supposed to have fewer side effects
- Still patients could experience a slowing of the heartbeat, arm, leg and back pain, hair loss, worsening of skin conditions and abdominal pain
Attorney General Bill Barr lashed out at the news media for skeptically reporting on the malaria drug hydroxychloroquine, which President Trump has been heralding as a coronavirus treatment.
‘The media has been on a jihad to discredit the drug,’ Barr said in a sit-down with Laura Ingraham that was broadcast Wednesday night on Fox News Channel. ‘It’s quite strange.’
While Trump has been stockpiling the drug and calling it a ‘game-changer,’ Swedish medical professionals in the Vastra Gotaland region have reported seeing patients suffer from side effects, including cramps, peripheral vision loss and migraines.
Attorney General Bill Barr pointed a finger at the White House press and said reporters were waging a ‘jihad’ to discredit the drug hydroxychloroquine
President Trump has called malaria drug hydroxychloroquine a ‘game-changer’ and even said he might take it, despite the medical commmunity still not having firm evidence that it treats COVID-19
There are concerns about administering the drug hydroxychloroquine and its sister drug chloroquine because of the laundry list of side effects the medications produce – though hydroxychloroquine is supposed to have fewer
It’s unclear if the patients were receiving chloroquine, sold under the brand name Aralen, or hydroxychloroquine, which is sold as Plaquenil – but doctors in that region have stopped administering the drug to COVID-19 patients.
The two drugs are close relatives of each other.
Both are synthetic versions of quinine, a product found in the bark of cinchona trees.
Hydroxchloroquine is supposed to give patients fewer side effects, but it still has quite a few including slowing the heartbeat, arm, leg and back pain, symptoms of heart failure, hair loss, worsening of skin conditions, stomach and abdominal pain.
The mental health side effects alone include anxiety, depression, rare thoughts of suicide and hallucinations.
The medical community hasn’t studied hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine enough to be able to say whether it truly has an impact on coronavirus infections.
But that hasn’t stopped Trump from saying that he might even ‘take it,’ as he told reporters during Saturday’s press briefing.
The president had made a claim that people with Lupus, who use hydroxychloroquine, are not getting the coronavirus.
Dr. Anthony Fauci explained that the subject is being studied and ‘we don’t have any definitive information to be able to make any comment on that,’ he told reporters.
‘It’s an obvious good question because it might be a way for us to get some interesting and potentially important data to the role of those medications,’ the doctor added.
Skepticism and fact-checking by the press hasn’t been appreciated by the president and his allies amid the coronavirus pandemic.
‘It’s very disappointing because I think the president went out at the beginning of ‘the pandemic] and really was statesmanlike, trying to bring people together, working with all the governors,’ Barr said on Fox. ‘Keeping his patience as he got these snarky, gotcha questions from the White House media pool and the stridency of the partisan attacks on him has gotten higher and higher.’