The federal Department of Veterans Affairs has actually been offering 1,300 veterans hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for the coronavirus since late March– despite the fact that the drug has not been shown to be effective versus the illness and may even trigger fatal heart issues
In a research study of 100,000 clients with COVID-19 released Friday in the medical journal The Lancet, clients who got hydroxychloroquine had a “ significantly higher danger of death” compared to those who were not given the drug. “We were unable to validate a benefit of hydroxychloroquine” on in-hospital outcomes for COVID-19, the scientists concluded.
An April study of veterans who were offered the drug– relentlessly hawked by President Donald Trump— produced similar findings
Veterans Affairs Secretary Robert Wilkie stated in a letter Friday to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer(D-N.Y.) that regardless of mounting concerns about the drug, the VA will continue to utilize hydroxychloroquine for veterans.
— Frank Thorp V (@frankthorp) May 22, 2020
Discoveries of the use of the controversial antimalarial drug have triggered concerns about the impacts it might have on veterans, much of whom are older and have underlying health conditions that make them more prone to a deadly negative effects of the drug: heart arrhythmias, or irregular heart beats.
” Veterans’ groups stay deeply worried that the VA has actually made large purchases of this drug and appears to have actually administered it to veterans in spite of the well-known, and in many cases, deadly threats,” Schumer wrote Wilkie previously this month
After Wilkie’s letter on Friday, Schumer reacted in a statement later that day, stating, “This drug might be useless or even damaging for COVID-19 clients, but the VA continues to administer it to numerous vets. Why are we simply learning this?”
” We require to understand what the basis was for using this drug against the consensus of science, which called into question its effectiveness in dealing with COVID-19,” he continued ” We also require to know who is authorizing these new trials, what centers are participating and what households are being informed.”
Trump has actually been aggressively pitching hydroxychloroquine given that March, even though the drug had n