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On March 16, SpaceX founder Elon Musk tweeted that the anti-malaria drug chloroquine was “maybe worth considering” as a treatment for COVID-19. He got 13,000 retweets. By March 19, President Donald Trump was touting chloroquine at a press conference. He even announced that the Food and Drug Administration had fast-tracked its approval for COVID-19. The FDA denied that this was the case a short time later.
While some of the hype has been fuelled by a document generated outside the scientific literature, chloroquine’s potential in treating COVID-19 is gaining traction in the medical community.
The drug has a long track record in medicine, having been used since the 1940s as an antimalarial. The modern drug is a synthetic form of quinine, which is found in the bark of the Cinchona plant. The plant was taken as an herbal remedy by indigenous Peruvians four centuries ago to ...
