The US is fast-tracking the
anti-malarial drug chloroquine for use as a treatment against the new
coronavirus, President Donald Trump said Thursday.
“We’re going to be able to make that drug available almost
immediately, and that’s where the FDA (Food and Drug Administration) has been
so great,” Trump told reporters.
“They’ve gone through the approval process — it’s been
approved. They took it down from many, many months to immediate. So we’re going
to be able to make that drug available by prescription.”
But the FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn later indicated that,
while the drug has not yet been formally approved, access to it was being
expanded so that authorities could gather more data.
This is known as “compassionate use.”
“If there is an experimental drug that is potentially
available, a doctor could ask for that drug to be used in a patient. We have
criteria for that and very speedy approval for that,” said Hahn.
