Just days after U.S. President Donald Trump announced in an interview on Sinclair Broadcasting that he had “Finished, just finished,” his course of hydroxychloroquine, a drug most commonly used to treat malaria, Taiwan’s Central Epidemic Command Center (CECC) said Tuesday that hydroxychloroquine did not improve recovery times in patients in Taiwan.
Speaking in his usual flippant manner, the U.S. President added “And by the way, I’m still here…To the best of my knowledge, here I am,” although Taiwan’s CECC has taken a more professional approach in now moving to discuss whether or not to remove hydroxychloroquine from its range of anti-COVID-19 treatments.
In a report released earlier this week patients of the virus in Taiwan who were treated with another antimalarial drug were declared free of the virus after 19.4 days, two full days shorter than the time taken to deem patients who were treated with hydroxychloroquine virus free.
Taiwan’s CECC initially started using the drug on the back of promising study results in France.
A day prior to Taiwan’s announcement, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General said that the WHO would no longer include the drug in its global anti-COVID-19 medical trials.
It is understood that the decision by the WHO was based on the drug actually increasing heart rates, and also raising the chances of dying from COVID-19 related issues.
