How Elon Musk tweets fuelled scramble for malaria medication

30 April 2020 - 06:00 By Dave Chambers
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Online interest in purchasing antimalarial medicine chloroquine to treat Covid-19 spiked after tweets from Tesla CEO Elon Musk and US President Donald Trump, a new study has found.
Online interest in purchasing antimalarial medicine chloroquine to treat Covid-19 spiked after tweets from Tesla CEO Elon Musk and US President Donald Trump, a new study has found.
Image: Reuters/Aly Song

He hasn't yet suggested injecting bleach, but tweets by SA's Elon Musk have been almost as damaging as US President Donald Trump's ill-advised musings on Covid-19 “treatments”.

Musk beat Trump to the draw by three days on March 16, when he tweeted about an antimalarial drug as a possible coronavirus treatment

“Maybe worth considering chloroquine for C19,” the technology tycoon said in a message to his 33.3-million followers.

Trump went on to endorse chloroquine on March 19, and on Wednesday a team of researchers from the UK and US said Google searches by people wanting to buy the drug immediately spiked.

Searches for purchasing chloroquine were 442% higher and searches for hydroxychloroquine were 1,389% higher. The first and largest spikes coincided with Musk's tweet and Trump's first endorsement.

Health authorities in Europe, the US and Canada, among others, have since issued warnings that serious side-effects of the two drugs, including heart rhythm problems, could be fatal.

Writing in JAMA Internal Medicine on Wednesday, lead author Michael Liu from Oxford University said: “We know that high-profile endorsements matter in advertising, so it stands to reason that these endorsements could spur people to seek out these medications.”

Liu's study used Google Trends, a public archive of aggregate Google searches, to track searches originating from the US between February 1 and March 29 related to chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine.

“We specifically wanted to know if people were looking to buy these drugs, instead of just looking to learn more about them,” said co-author John Ayers of the University of California San Diego.

The study tracked all Google searches mentioning “chloroquine” or “hydroxychloroquine” in combination with “buy”, “order”, “Walmart”, “eBay” or “Amazon”.

The team then compared these phrases' search frequency with a hypothetical scenario in which there were no high-profile endorsements, based on historical search trends for the same terms.

Even after widespread reports of a fatal chloroquine poisoning in Arizona on March 23, searches for chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine were 212% and 1,167% greater than expected until the end of observation on March 29.

US President Donald Trump at the White House in Washington on Tuesday.
US President Donald Trump at the White House in Washington on Tuesday.
Image: Reuters/Carlos Barria

“In absolute terms, we estimate there were more than 200,000 total Google searches for buying these two drugs in only 14 days following high-profile endorsements. This could be evidence that thousands of Americans were interested in purchasing these drugs,” said Mark Dredze of Johns Hopkins University.

Liu said the endorsements from Musk and Trump were problematic for three reasons.

“First, these treatments have inconclusive clinical efficacy. Second, these drugs have potentially fatal side-effects. Third, chloroquine-containing products such as aquarium cleaner are commercially available to the public without a medical prescription,” he said.

Dredze added: “We usually think misinformation spreads from unreliable health sources, online trolls and bots. It's rare to have health misinformation coming from such high-profile figures.”


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