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Emails show how Dr. Mehmet Oz promoted anti-malarial drugs for Covid directly to the White House.
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He emailed two senior advisors asking them to recommend the drug before clinical trials were completed.
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Clinical studies show that the drug hydroxychloroquine is not effective as a COVID-19 treatment.
A recently released 2020 email shows how Dr. Mehmet Oz, now a Republican Senate candidate from Pennsylvania, promoted an antimalarial drug directly to Trump’s White House as a COVID-19 treatment in the early stages of the pandemic. is shown.
The email was published on Wednesday report From the Select House Committee on the Coronavirus Crisis. They include messages from Oz to former President Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and senior White House advisers, including Deborah Birks, who was the administration’s coronavirus response coordinator at the time. increase.
Oz emailed Birx and Kushner separately in March 2020 — when the U.S. was still finding a footing in the fight against the virus — urging them to push hydroxychloroquine As a treatment for COVID-19 before clinical trials are completed.
In a message to Burks, Oz urged the U.S. to begin patient trials of the drug as soon as possible and requested that U.S. physicians be allowed to begin dosing as a Covid treatment if testing is not possible. did.
“You cannot hide behind a research protocol if you are not allowed to continue,” he wrote.
“I want the brave Americans on the show tomorrow to be on trial, but I can’t do it without a game plan to access drugs,” he added. I will recruit and pay for the clinical trial,” he wrote, but he was having trouble finding an anti-malarial drug.
quoted the testimony of French microbiologist Dr. Didier Raoultin randomized or non-peer-reviewed tests, said the drug was effective in eliminating 24 patients with COVID.
The same drug was also defended by Trump around the same time There was no clinical evidence to replicate the results reported by Raoult, but as a treatment for coronavirus.
Hydroxychloroquine was one of many drugs that researchers rushed to test during the pandemic, but several the study It was later found to not work as a treatment for COVID-19. In March 2021, world health organization We also strongly advise against using drugs to prevent Covid infection.
Clinical trials are a ‘slow process’: Oz
On the same day Oz emailed Birx, he also emailed Kushner, promoting the rapid deployment of hydroxychloroquine to fight the pandemic.
He said the Trump administration and the White House’s chief medical adviser, Dr. Anthony Fauci, wanted to conduct randomized trials of the drug before declaring it a treatment for COVID-19.
But Oz said while these clinical trials were underway, the White House “quickly told doctors to use a drug mixture containing hydroxychloroquine and another drug, azithromycin, to treat Covid patients. I was able to allow
“Furthermore, it should be outlined that there are 130 million hydroxychloroquine tablets on the market, which could treat 5 to 10 million people, providing additional supplies to slow the coronavirus. We will give you an accurate timetable,” Oz wrote to Kushner.
When Kushner replied that clinical trials for the drug would begin that week, Oz replied that such studies would be “a slow process that takes a month to produce results.”
He encouraged Kushner to “make hydroxychloroquine trials a national priority and insist on immediate registration.”
“Almost a week after knowing the French data and over a month after knowing the Chinese data, there are still no patients in the trial,” he wrote. “Doctors and nurses are already struggling to find off-label tablets, but at least we can find a solution to the pandemic soon.”
Kushner replied: “What would you recommend to speed it up?”
A week after Oz sent an email to two of his advisors, he sent another message to Birx, saying that early research on hydroxychloroquine found the drug to be “safe, with better-than-expected results.” It has been shown to be excellent,” he said.
An email thread shows that Birx forwarded the email to Stephen Hahn, then Commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration. “We should talk,” read her email.
The message from Oz is part of a larger report from a House committee urging Trump administration officials to pressure the FDA to approve an unproven treatment for emergency use against COVID-19. He accused me of taking it.
Hydroxychloroquine was one of the major drugs Trump advisers pushed to bring back for emergency approval. According to reports.
in June, Burks testified Before the commission investigating the coronavirus crisis, people “routinely” shared dangerous thoughts about hydroxychloroquine with Trump.
Oz did not immediately respond to Insider’s request for comment.
Read the original article at business insider