RIO DE JANEIRO -- After months of touting an unproven anti-malaria drug as a treatment for the new coronavirus, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro is turning himself into a test case live before millions of people as he takes hydroxychloroquine pills on social media and encourages others to do the same.
Bolsonaro said this week that he tested positive for the virus but already felt better thanks to hydroxychloroquine. Hours later he shared a video of himself gulping down what he said was his third dose.
"I trust hydroxychloroquine," he said, smiling. "And you?"
On Wednesday, he was again extolling the drug's benefits on Facebook, and claimed that his political opponents were rooting against it.
A string of studies in Britain and the United States, as well as by the World Health Organization, have found chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine ineffective against covid-19 and sometimes deadly because of their adverse side effects on the heart. Several studies were canceled early because of adverse effects.
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President Donald Trump has promoted hydroxychloroquine with a doctor's prescription as a treatment for covid-19, but chloroquine -- a more toxic version of the drug, produced in Brazil -- has been promoted by Bolsonaro, who contends the virus is largely unavoidable and not a serious medical problem.
Trump first mentioned hydroxychloroquine March 19 during a pandemic briefing. Two days later, and a month after Brazil's first confirmed case, Bolsonaro took one of his only big actions to fight the coronavirus. He announced he was directing the Brazilian army to ramp up output of chloroquine.
The army churned out more than 2 million pills -- 18 times the country's normal annual production -- even as Brazil's intensive care medicine association recommended it not be prescribed and doctors mostly complied.
The White House on May 31 said it had donated 2 million hydroxychloroquine pills to Brazil. Two weeks later the U.S. Food & Drug Administration revoked authorization for its emergency use, citing adverse side effects and saying it is unlikely to be effective.
Brazil's audit court on June 18 requested an investigation into alleged overbilling from local production of chloroquine, which it called unreasonable given the drug's ineffectiveness and cited the FDA decision. Meantime, stocks of sedatives and other medications used in intensive care ran out in three states, according to a June report from Brazil's council of state health secretariats.
A former defense minister, Aldo Rebelo, said he is concerned the army will be wrongly blamed for its involvement in production of a drug that most experts call ineffective against the coronavirus.
"All they did was to follow a legal order and produce the pills," said Rebelo. "The problem is the health ministry and the decision that the president made."
Brazil's interim health minister, an army general with no health experience before April, endorsed chloroquine as a covid-19 treatment days after assuming the post in May. His predecessor, a doctor and health consultant, quit rather than do so.
