Why Is Everyone Picking On Dr. Trump?

It wouldn't have surprised me at all to hear that thousands of Trump's moron followers in Wyoming, Mississippi, the Dakotas and South Carolina we ingesting household cleaners. But, remember, even in the bluest states, there are pockets of gross ignorance and Trumpism. Friday, the New Oak Daily News reported "an unusually high number of New Yorkers contacted city health authorities over fears that they had ingested bleach or other household cleaners in the 18 hours that followed President Trump’s bogus claim that injecting such products could cure coronavirus. The Poison Control Center, a subagency of the city’s Health Department, managed a total of 30 cases of possible exposure to disinfectants between 9 p.m. Thursday and 3 p.m. Friday." 9 people ingested Lysol, 10 drank bleach and 11 just reported taking household cleaners in general. As of Friday evening there had been no known fatalities.

More worrying was a report in the NY Times by Ellen Gabler and Michael Keller that prescriptions surged as Trump praised his pet drugs. Prescriptions have to be written by legitimate doctors. On March 19, when Trump first started hyping chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine first-time prescriptions for the drugs "poured into retail pharmacies at more than 46 times the rate of the average weekday... And the nearly 32,000 prescriptions came from across the spectrum-- rheumatologists, cardiologists, dermatologists, psychiatrists and even podiatrists, the data shows.

You would think doctors would have refused prescribing drugs to patients who had neither lumpus nor malaria... but thousands of them didn't. After Señor Trumpanzee's idiotic, dangerous and baseless remarks last month, pharmacies everywhere in the country-- not just red states-- "reported a run on the drugs, which are mostly prescribed by a small subset of medical specialists. Within days, states began issuing emergency orders to restrict the new prescriptions." That's scary.

A new poll released by the Associated Press late last week, shows that just 23% of Americans say they find Trump a trusted source of information about coronavirus. Only 7% of Democrats and 12% of independents trust what he says about the pandemic. Even among admitted Republicans, only 47% are willing to say they trust his information.

Gabler and Keller continued that "While medical experts have since stepped up warnings about the drugs’ possibly dangerous side effects, they were still being prescribed at more than six times the normal rate during the second week of April, the analysis shows. All the while, Mr. Trump continued to extol their use. 'It’s having some very good results, I’ll tell you,' he said in a White House briefing on April 13." That was a lie.

The extraordinary change in prescribing patterns reflects, at least in part, the outsize reach of the Trump megaphone, even when his pronouncements distort scientific evidence or run counter to the recommendations of experts in his own administration. It also offers the clearest evidence yet of the perils of a president willing to push unproven and potentially dangerous remedies to a public desperate for relief from the pandemic.

On Friday, the Food and Drug Administration warned against using the drugs outside a hospital setting or clinical trial because they could lead to serious heart rhythm problems in some coronavirus patients. Days earlier, the federal agency led by Dr. Anthony S. Fauci-- one of Mr. Trump’s top advisers on the pandemic-- issued cautionary advice on the drugs, and stated that there was no proven medication to treat the virus.

As the prescriptions surged in the second half of March, the largest volumes per capita included states hit hardest by coronavirus, like New York and New Jersey. Georgia, Arkansas and Kentucky were other states with relatively high per-capita figures. In absolute numbers, California and Washington, the earliest-hit states, were among the largest. The biggest number in either category was in Florida, where nearly one prescription was written for every thousand residents.

Carmen Catizone, executive director of the National Association of Boards of Pharmacy, said the surge created shortages that “put patients at risk who depend on these medications” to treat other illnesses.

“The fact that people reacted to what the White House said in such a way-- in the 35 years I’ve been in pharmacy and pharmacy regulation, I’ve never seen that before,” he said.

More than 40,000 health care professionals were first-time prescribers of the drugs in March, according to the data, which is anonymized and based on insurance claims filed for about 300 million patients in the United States, representing approximately 90 percent of the country’s population. The data is current through April 14.

Mike Donnelly, vice president of communications for the Lupus Foundation of America, said that the organization received calls and emails daily from patients who were told their prescription could be filled only in part or not at all. A spokesman for the Arthritis Foundation said some patients received their refills only after calling around to as many as a dozen pharmacies.

In the past month, about 40 states have intervened in some manner to quell the frenzy.

Idaho was the first to take a hard line, issuing a temporary rule on the same day that Mr. Trump first mentioned the drugs in his daily briefing. The rule banned pharmacists from dispensing chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine unless the prescription included a written diagnosis of a condition that the drugs had been proved to treat. The rule also limited prescriptions to a 14-day supply unless a patient had previously taken the medication.

The director of Idaho’s State Board of Pharmacy said at the time that many of the prescriptions were being written by doctors for themselves and their family members, a trend reported by other state boards as well.

Some of those writing prescriptions for themselves may have been on the front lines treating patients; the data shows an uptick among health care practitioners working in emergency medicine. More broadly, the analysis indicates a major shift in the kinds of medical practitioners writing the prescriptions, based on prescribing patterns in retail pharmacies since 2016.

Historically, the majority of chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine prescriptions have come out of a narrow band of specialties like rheumatology. That changed last month, when the specialties reflected in the data included larger numbers of those working in dermatology, ophthalmology, podiatry, urology and other areas.

...Trump soon extended his interest to a combination of one of those drugs, hydroxychloroquine, with an antibiotic, azithromycin.

“HYDROXYCHLOROQUINE & AZITHROMYCIN, taken together, have a real chance to be one of the biggest game changers in the history of medicine,” he wrote in a post to Twitter around 10 a.m. on March 21, a Saturday.

The tweet coincided with a weekend flood of prescriptions for the two antimalarial drugs. By the end of the day, the prescriptions had increased 114 times at retail pharmacies compared with the average weekend day, according to The Times analysis.

On Tuesday, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, led by Dr. Fauci, issued guidelines against the combination of hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin except in clinical trials, with experts citing "the potential for toxicities."

Enthusiasm for the drugs has been waning over the past couple weeks, including at Mr. Trump’s own news conferences and among researchers.

A small trial in Brazil of chloroquine was halted after coronavirus patients taking higher doses developed irregular heart rates that increased their risk of a potentially fatal heart arrhythmia. A study of 368 patients in U.S. veterans hospitals found that hydroxychloroquine was associated with an increased death rate; the drug, used with or without the antibiotic azithromycin, also did not help patients avoid the need for ventilators. (The veterans study was not a controlled trial, and neither study has been peer-reviewed.)

Mr. Trump was asked about the veterans study at his briefing on Tuesday.

“Obviously, there have been some very good reports and perhaps this one is not a good report,” he said.

By Thursday, Mr. Trump had moved on to a different subject, raising a question at his White House briefing about the use of disinfectants to kill the coronavirus inside the body. The remarks were followed by dire warnings from state health officials, who were inundated with requests for information about such a course of action. The president’s press secretary tried to make the case the comments were taken out of context by the news media, and Mr. Trump later insisted he had only been kidding.

Poor Dr. Birx; Trump says he wasn't even talking to her... but... but... this video from RepublicansForThe RuleOfLaw.com looks like they have made Dr. Birx look like Trump was talking with her-- and like she wanted to inject him Drano.