8 ms·

The title belies the truth that those doses of hydroxychloroquine were and are still not useless. It is used to treat Lupus and other conditions. The stockpilin

The title belies the truth that those doses of hydroxychloroquine were and are still not useless. It is used to treat Lupus and other conditions. The stockpiling caused prices at one point to nearly double and created shortage for people with disabilities. This needs to be considered beyond the obvious material waste. How many people need to be hurt before accountability is finally laid upon the leadership of this nation? Edit: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2020/05/23/hydroxychloroquine-short-supply-lupus-patients-who-need/5245542002/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2020/05/23/hydroxychloro...

mlyle 6y ago
Huge amounts of the hydroxychloroquine debacle were dubious-- public statements about efficacy, broken early trials, etc. But: in March, it was one of very few leads on a treatment. Building some degree of a strategic stockpile and ensuring that manufacturing was increased made sense, even if it was a long shot. It's unfortunate that this had a negative effect upon people, but if there had been efficacy having that stockpile would have been extremely beneficial.
- osrec 6y ago
  Did they stockpile remdesivir in the same quantities, given its actual efficacy?
  - dumbfoundded 6y ago
    No, President Trump didn't hold any shares of the manufacturers. The company behind its production is donating its stockpile to the US Government: https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexandrasternlicht/2020/05/03/entire-stockpile-of-coronavirus-treatment-remdesivir-donated-to-government-says-ceo/#6c7576ea725f https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexandrasternlicht/2020/05/03/...
    - bioinformatics 6y ago
      You only watch CNN too?
      - makomk 6y ago
        Wrong mainstream news outlet. The stupid conspiracy theory about Trump pushing hydroxychloroquine because he owned shares in its manufacturer was mostly the New York Times' doing. (This lead to the rather unusual spectacle of Snopes debunking a nonsensical online conspiracy theory pushed by the NYT... and there was plenty wrong with it, from the utterly miniscule size of Trump's indirect shareholding via a mutual fund to the low amount of money to be made from it to the fact that apparently that company was no longer selling it in the US anyway, some of which the NYT were clearly aware of.)
  - bioinformatics 6y ago
    remdesivir is a quite new drug and really hard to manufacture. Also HCQ is a very old drug, created on WWII and really easy to manufacture.
  - adventured 6y ago
    They're very different contexts. Gilead doesn't have such a large stockpile or production capability for Remdesivir. Everything Gilead had was turned over to the government. From May 3rd: "Gilead CEO says remdesivir will be available to patients this week: ‘We’ve donated the entire supply’" "Gilead expects to produce more than 140,000 rounds of its 10-day treatment regimen by the end of May and anticipates it can make 1 million rounds by the end of this year." https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/03/gilead-ceo-says-remdesivir-available-to-coronavirus-patients-this-week-weve-donated-the-entire-supply.html https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/03/gilead-ceo-says-remdesivir-a...
  - mc32 6y ago
    That one is difficult to manufacture, so the effort necessary would be much higher.
  - ars 6y ago
    Between 2006 and 2014 we spent FAR FAR more money stockpiling Tamiflu which does absolutely nothing. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-roche-hldg-novartis-search/stockpiles-of-roche-tamiflu-drug-are-waste-of-money-review-finds-idUSBREA390EJ20140410 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-roche-hldg-novartis-searc...
  - pnutjam 6y ago
    Did they stockpile PPE? It's proven effective for this pandemic and many other situations; however the feds let the stockpile dwindle for no good reason.
    - thu2111 6y ago
      I thought the jury was still out on masks at least. The WHO keeps changing its mind about them, as do other governments.
      - pnutjam 6y ago
        It's not, nobody is changing their mind. There were some efforts to reserve masks for front line medical workers. That muddied the issue, but masks protect you from spreading a sickness you may now know you have and provide a minimal amount of protection from catching covid-19.
        thu2111 6y ago
        Nobody is changing their mind? That's obviously nonsense. There have been so many reversals it made the news. https://nypost.com/2020/06/06/who-reverses-position-on-face-masks-as-coronavirus-cases-climb/ https://nypost.com/2020/06/06/who-reverses-position-on-face-... Different authorities can't even agree: https://abcnews.go.com/Health/cdc-offer-conflicting-advice-masks-expert-tells-us/story?id=70958380 https://abcnews.go.com/Health/cdc-offer-conflicting-advice-m... The mask situation is absurd, one more failure on top of so many others for the global health establishment.
        pnutjam 6y ago
        Wrong! https://www.cnn.com/videos/health/2020/06/23/anthony-fauci-masks-question-vpx.cnn https://www.cnn.com/videos/health/2020/06/23/anthony-fauci-m... The masks were alway recommended to slow transmission.
        thu2111 6y ago
- tom_mellior 6y ago
  It was never a lead. The first study pushing it was immediately recognized as broken. No better evidence ever came along. No plausible mechanism of action was proposed.
  - iguy 6y ago
    Maybe this was clear to some, but lots of people thought it worthwhile to fund trials. To me 63M doses of a cheap drug sounds like a really small bet. We should be willing to make lots of them, on the slightest hope, knowing that most will be wasted. Get 50 experts and fund anything which gets 2 votes.
    - justin66 6y ago
      > Maybe this was clear to some, but lots of people thought it worthwhile to fund trials. "A lot of people are saying..."
      - iguy 6y ago
        A policy of funding a domestic trial of anything which anyone else is trying anywhere in the world wouldn't be crazy, actually. We're not trying to only make safe bets; the cost of not having a solution is 1000 deaths a day.
        justin66 6y ago
        > A policy of funding a domestic trial of anything which anyone else is trying anywhere in the world wouldn't be crazy, actually. It seems rather crazy to me, but perhaps more importantly, it is a strategy that - implemented literally - would result in the US leadership being very easily led by others "anywhere in the world" in matters of drug research, a situation which would be very amenable to manipulation for profit. That's obviously wrong. We want the US leadership to be very easily led by Fox News personalities and whatever is popping on Twitter.
    - sharkmerry 6y ago
      I think the issue was, as another commenter stated, it has current uses for patients and the price almost doubled. So people had shortages or couldnt afford needed medicine. because of a (apparently) dubious study
- gsibble 6y ago
  My point exactly. Made total sense to stockpile it.
- cm2187 6y ago
  And we are about to do exactly the same thing with vaccines, to preemptively produce them before we even know they are safe or useful.
- trhway 6y ago
  >if there had been efficacy there have been efficacy all along against lupus/etc. Yet ephemeral unproven chance of efficacy against coronavirus was chosen over well known benefit for the already suffering people. That looks extremely illogical and kind of cruel to me. Not surprising though given that it isn't logic nor compassion that drives the government actions these days.
  - mlyle 6y ago
    Unproven chance of reducing mortality and reducing overload on critical health care system was chosen against well known disease management with multiple alternative drugs. Not that even this was intended, but it's unsurprising that efforts to stockpile and allocate supplies don't work perfectly.
- SomeoneFromCA 6y ago
  Central Asian countries, Uzbekistan in particular uses chloroquine (not hydroxy) to treat Covid patients. The official sources are highly unreliable, but overall the death rate is very low, even if you multiply it by 100.
  - rpiguy 6y ago
    Same in Bangladesh and other countries.
e40 6y ago
Not just that. People in CA with lupus (husband of a coworker) were told (by Kaiser) they would no longer be able to get the drug, which is very important to their health. Really disgusting how this whole thing played out.
- postnihilism 6y ago
  I have an immediate family member with rheumatoid arthritis who struggled to fill their prescription through Kaiser because of this as well. It caused a lot of stress in my family. If they were unable to fill their prescription and had complications as a result, they may have needed to go to the hospital, which is not something you want to in the middle of a pandemic when you have an autoimmune disease...
  - tzs 6y ago
    OT: Does anyone know of a good way to find out what a drug will cost at a Kaiser pharmacy on a Kaiser insurance plan? I've got Kaiser and the pharmacy is unable (or unwilling) to tell me, given a drug, dosage, quantity, and my Kaiser ID how much it will cost unless I actually try to have the prescription filled there. For some drugs, Kaiser is the way to go. Lipitor, e.g., is free. For some, taking the prescription elsewhere and using a GoodRx coupon instead of insurance is better. E.g., irbesartan is $46 for 90 days mail order via Kaiser (mail order is cheaper than in-person), but only $22-31 at several other well known pharmacies with a GoodRx coupon. I've heard that if you get a printed prescription from your Kaiser doctor, instead of having the doctor send the prescription electronically to a pharmacy, you can take the printed prescription and your Kaiser card to the Kaiser pharmacy and then they will tell you what it would cost without you having to actually have it filled to find that out, but I've not had a chance to try this to see if it is true.
    - e40 6y ago
      HR reports to me and my HR person is very good and uses Kaiser a lot for expensive meds. She's never found a way to do what you want, either for herself or for our employees.
mirimir 6y ago
It's also popular for arthritis. And there are mechanisms for getting meds back into the pharma distribution system. Some small wholesalers specialize in stock from failed pharmacies, and even from fire sales.
logicslave 6y ago
Thinly veiled political agenda
- iso-8859-1 6y ago
  Those are some adjectives and a noun. What are you implying? Do you not think that birdyrooster is insightful?
  - logicslave 6y ago
    I've got better things to do than argue, but this website needs to be shielded from this. Please take it to twitter
    - iso-8859-1 6y ago
      The Twitter character limit prohibits going in depth. That is the opposite of what I am looking for. Also, the lack of threading discourages having branches of discussion for the lesser important points.

mlyle 6y ago

Huge amounts of the hydroxychloroquine debacle were dubious-- public statements about efficacy, broken early trials, etc. But: in March, it was one of very few leads on a treatment. Building some degree of a strategic stockpile and ensuring that manufacturing was increased made sense, even if it was a long shot. It's unfortunate that this had a negative effect upon people, but if there had been efficacy having that stockpile would have been extremely beneficial.

osrec 6y ago
Did they stockpile remdesivir in the same quantities, given its actual efficacy?
- dumbfoundded 6y ago
  No, President Trump didn't hold any shares of the manufacturers. The company behind its production is donating its stockpile to the US Government: https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexandrasternlicht/2020/05/03/entire-stockpile-of-coronavirus-treatment-remdesivir-donated-to-government-says-ceo/#6c7576ea725f https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexandrasternlicht/2020/05/03/...
  - bioinformatics 6y ago
    You only watch CNN too?
    - makomk 6y ago
      Wrong mainstream news outlet. The stupid conspiracy theory about Trump pushing hydroxychloroquine because he owned shares in its manufacturer was mostly the New York Times' doing. (This lead to the rather unusual spectacle of Snopes debunking a nonsensical online conspiracy theory pushed by the NYT... and there was plenty wrong with it, from the utterly miniscule size of Trump's indirect shareholding via a mutual fund to the low amount of money to be made from it to the fact that apparently that company was no longer selling it in the US anyway, some of which the NYT were clearly aware of.)
- bioinformatics 6y ago
  remdesivir is a quite new drug and really hard to manufacture. Also HCQ is a very old drug, created on WWII and really easy to manufacture.
- adventured 6y ago
  They're very different contexts. Gilead doesn't have such a large stockpile or production capability for Remdesivir. Everything Gilead had was turned over to the government. From May 3rd: "Gilead CEO says remdesivir will be available to patients this week: ‘We’ve donated the entire supply’" "Gilead expects to produce more than 140,000 rounds of its 10-day treatment regimen by the end of May and anticipates it can make 1 million rounds by the end of this year." https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/03/gilead-ceo-says-remdesivir-available-to-coronavirus-patients-this-week-weve-donated-the-entire-supply.html https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/03/gilead-ceo-says-remdesivir-a...
- mc32 6y ago
  That one is difficult to manufacture, so the effort necessary would be much higher.
- ars 6y ago
  Between 2006 and 2014 we spent FAR FAR more money stockpiling Tamiflu which does absolutely nothing. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-roche-hldg-novartis-search/stockpiles-of-roche-tamiflu-drug-are-waste-of-money-review-finds-idUSBREA390EJ20140410 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-roche-hldg-novartis-searc...
- pnutjam 6y ago
  Did they stockpile PPE? It's proven effective for this pandemic and many other situations; however the feds let the stockpile dwindle for no good reason.
  - thu2111 6y ago
    I thought the jury was still out on masks at least. The WHO keeps changing its mind about them, as do other governments.
    - pnutjam 6y ago
      It's not, nobody is changing their mind. There were some efforts to reserve masks for front line medical workers. That muddied the issue, but masks protect you from spreading a sickness you may now know you have and provide a minimal amount of protection from catching covid-19.
      - thu2111 6y ago
        Nobody is changing their mind? That's obviously nonsense. There have been so many reversals it made the news. https://nypost.com/2020/06/06/who-reverses-position-on-face-masks-as-coronavirus-cases-climb/ https://nypost.com/2020/06/06/who-reverses-position-on-face-... Different authorities can't even agree: https://abcnews.go.com/Health/cdc-offer-conflicting-advice-masks-expert-tells-us/story?id=70958380 https://abcnews.go.com/Health/cdc-offer-conflicting-advice-m... The mask situation is absurd, one more failure on top of so many others for the global health establishment.
        pnutjam 6y ago
        Wrong! https://www.cnn.com/videos/health/2020/06/23/anthony-fauci-masks-question-vpx.cnn https://www.cnn.com/videos/health/2020/06/23/anthony-fauci-m... The masks were alway recommended to slow transmission.
        thu2111 6y ago
tom_mellior 6y ago
It was never a lead. The first study pushing it was immediately recognized as broken. No better evidence ever came along. No plausible mechanism of action was proposed.
- iguy 6y ago
  Maybe this was clear to some, but lots of people thought it worthwhile to fund trials. To me 63M doses of a cheap drug sounds like a really small bet. We should be willing to make lots of them, on the slightest hope, knowing that most will be wasted. Get 50 experts and fund anything which gets 2 votes.
  - justin66 6y ago
    > Maybe this was clear to some, but lots of people thought it worthwhile to fund trials. "A lot of people are saying..."
    - iguy 6y ago
      A policy of funding a domestic trial of anything which anyone else is trying anywhere in the world wouldn't be crazy, actually. We're not trying to only make safe bets; the cost of not having a solution is 1000 deaths a day.
      - justin66 6y ago
        > A policy of funding a domestic trial of anything which anyone else is trying anywhere in the world wouldn't be crazy, actually. It seems rather crazy to me, but perhaps more importantly, it is a strategy that - implemented literally - would result in the US leadership being very easily led by others "anywhere in the world" in matters of drug research, a situation which would be very amenable to manipulation for profit. That's obviously wrong. We want the US leadership to be very easily led by Fox News personalities and whatever is popping on Twitter.
  - sharkmerry 6y ago
    I think the issue was, as another commenter stated, it has current uses for patients and the price almost doubled. So people had shortages or couldnt afford needed medicine. because of a (apparently) dubious study
gsibble 6y ago
My point exactly. Made total sense to stockpile it.
cm2187 6y ago
And we are about to do exactly the same thing with vaccines, to preemptively produce them before we even know they are safe or useful.
trhway 6y ago
>if there had been efficacy there have been efficacy all along against lupus/etc. Yet ephemeral unproven chance of efficacy against coronavirus was chosen over well known benefit for the already suffering people. That looks extremely illogical and kind of cruel to me. Not surprising though given that it isn't logic nor compassion that drives the government actions these days.
- mlyle 6y ago
  Unproven chance of reducing mortality and reducing overload on critical health care system was chosen against well known disease management with multiple alternative drugs. Not that even this was intended, but it's unsurprising that efforts to stockpile and allocate supplies don't work perfectly.
SomeoneFromCA 6y ago
Central Asian countries, Uzbekistan in particular uses chloroquine (not hydroxy) to treat Covid patients. The official sources are highly unreliable, but overall the death rate is very low, even if you multiply it by 100.
- rpiguy 6y ago
  Same in Bangladesh and other countries.

e40 6y ago

Not just that. People in CA with lupus (husband of a coworker) were told (by Kaiser) they would no longer be able to get the drug, which is very important to their health. Really disgusting how this whole thing played out.

postnihilism 6y ago
I have an immediate family member with rheumatoid arthritis who struggled to fill their prescription through Kaiser because of this as well. It caused a lot of stress in my family. If they were unable to fill their prescription and had complications as a result, they may have needed to go to the hospital, which is not something you want to in the middle of a pandemic when you have an autoimmune disease...
- tzs 6y ago
  OT: Does anyone know of a good way to find out what a drug will cost at a Kaiser pharmacy on a Kaiser insurance plan? I've got Kaiser and the pharmacy is unable (or unwilling) to tell me, given a drug, dosage, quantity, and my Kaiser ID how much it will cost unless I actually try to have the prescription filled there. For some drugs, Kaiser is the way to go. Lipitor, e.g., is free. For some, taking the prescription elsewhere and using a GoodRx coupon instead of insurance is better. E.g., irbesartan is $46 for 90 days mail order via Kaiser (mail order is cheaper than in-person), but only $22-31 at several other well known pharmacies with a GoodRx coupon. I've heard that if you get a printed prescription from your Kaiser doctor, instead of having the doctor send the prescription electronically to a pharmacy, you can take the printed prescription and your Kaiser card to the Kaiser pharmacy and then they will tell you what it would cost without you having to actually have it filled to find that out, but I've not had a chance to try this to see if it is true.
  - e40 6y ago
    HR reports to me and my HR person is very good and uses Kaiser a lot for expensive meds. She's never found a way to do what you want, either for herself or for our employees.

mirimir 6y ago

It's also popular for arthritis. And there are mechanisms for getting meds back into the pharma distribution system. Some small wholesalers specialize in stock from failed pharmacies, and even from fire sales.

logicslave 6y ago

Thinly veiled political agenda

iso-8859-1 6y ago
Those are some adjectives and a noun. What are you implying? Do you not think that birdyrooster is insightful?
- logicslave 6y ago
  I've got better things to do than argue, but this website needs to be shielded from this. Please take it to twitter
  - iso-8859-1 6y ago
    The Twitter character limit prohibits going in depth. That is the opposite of what I am looking for. Also, the lack of threading discourages having branches of discussion for the lesser important points.