Fact check: Hydroxychloroquine has not worked in treating COVID-19, studies show
Miriam Fauzia
USA TODAY
Updated 2:26 July 21, 2020
The claim:
Hydroxychloroquine has worked through the entirety of the pandemic
Since it made its social media debut in late March, hydroxychloroquine has become a contentious topic in an already polarized pandemic debate.
Politicians, health officials and scientists have trumpeted various opinions on hydroxychloroquine's effectiveness, ranging from miracle drug to potentially harmful and dangerous.
A Facebook post on what is described as the personal page of Pennsylvania state Sen. Doug Mastriano claims the drug has been useful in the fight against COVID-19. The post has more than 1,700 shares.
The post is a screenshot of a tweet by David Samadi, a urologist who regularly makes TV appearances, including on Fox News as a medical expert: "I want to ensure that everyone understands the gravity of the situation here. Hydroxychloroquine worked this whole time. The media said it would literally kill you if you took it simply because POTUS promoted it as a cure. Thousands of people likely DIED because of this."
USA TODAY is awaiting comment from Mastriano. The tweet was also widely shared on Facebook and Instagram by other users.
First, there was tree bark
To understand hydroxychloroquine, it is necessary to trace its historical roots.
The drug was originally derived from the cinchona tree, commonly used by the ancient Incas of South America to combat fevers. By the 1600s, either Spanish doctors or Jesuit priests – the accounts vary – were introduced to the bark's fever-reducing properties and imported it to Europe in 1630.
It took nearly two centuries for the essential medicinal compound to be discovered. In 1820, French chemists Pierre Joseph Pelletier and Joseph Bienaimé Caventou purified quinine from the bark and constructed a factory in Paris for its production. The new drug gained traction in the medical community and was used to treat malaria-related fevers.
As European colonial territories grew during the early 19th century, so did the need for quinine. The British used it as a malaria prophylaxis in 1848, spending nearly £53,000 annually to import cinchona bark to its colonies in Asia and Africa. Spending dropped in 1861, when they started planting the tree in India. Around the same time, the Dutch began growing their own cinchona in Java and elsewhere in southeast Asia, eventually establishing the region as the center of the quinine industry.
The search for alternatives
When the Netherlands fell under German occupation in 1940, and Java fell to the Japanese in 1942, production of quinine came to a halt. Before World War II, the Germans developed a synthetic antimalarial drug chemically known as quinacrine and trademarked as Atabrine. It had an unpleasant side effect of turning skin and the whites of eyes yellow; the Germans promptly abandoned it, deeming it too toxic for human use.
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