Johns Hopkins doctor on Trump's preventative hydroxychloroquine use: 'hopefully other people will not follow this example'

Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security Senior Scholar Dr. Amesh Adalja joins Yahoo Finance’s Seana Smith to discuss President Trump’s remarks that he is taking hydroxychloroquine as a preventative measure against COVID-19.

Video Transcript

SEANA SMITH: New developments out of the White House, we have President Trump saying yesterday that he is taking hydroxychloroquine as a preventative measure against coronavirus. This comes despite warnings of dangerous side effects. So for more on this, I want to bring in Dr. Amesh Adalja, Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security senior scholar. And Dr. Adalja, it's great to have you back on the show. Let me get your thoughts just about what we heard from President Trump yesterday, saying that he's taking hydroxychloroquine as a preventative measure. How dangerous is this?

AMESH ADALJA: Well, you have to remember that every drug has a side effect profile, and that side effect profile is dependent on the individual taking it, what their risk factors for disease might be, what other medications they're taking. And you have to be careful when you're prescribing any medication to someone who is elderly and may have a predisposition to heart problems, which is what happens when hydroxychloroquine has toxicity, that it causes electrical disturbances to the heart.

So you want to make sure this is done safely. And really, you have to weigh the risk and the benefit and remember that we don't have any evidence for hydroxychloroquine being effective as a treatment, and we have even less evidence for it being useful as a prophylactic or preventative. There is a randomized control trial going on right now and it's really important that we get that data, but I don't think that it's really a recommended thing to do. And hopefully other people will not follow this example and demand hydroxychloroquine for preventive treatment.

SEANA SMITH: And Dr. Adalja, just taking a step back and talking about where we stand for treatments and also vaccines at this point, just what's your reading on that? We had the news from Moderna yesterday. It triggered a massive rally in the markets. A lot of people are very excited about those developments. I guess how hopeful are you about a possible treatment-- or possible vaccine, I should say, excuse me, in a relatively timely manner.

AMESH ADALJA: I'm hopeful about a vaccine but not necessarily in a relatively timely manner. You have to remember that although Moderna's results were very encouraging and everybody is excited about them, it was a phase one clinical trial. There are another-- there are two more phases that we need to go through. We need to understand what the side effect profile is, what the dosing is, how many doses you have to give.

So there's still a ways to go before we actually have a positive vaccine that we can actually put into people. So I don't think-- I think it's important not to wed ourselves to any kind of date that this is going to be ready. Vaccine development is usually years, not months. Everybody is going very, very fast, but I don't think we should get a false sense of security that there's going to be a vaccine at the end of the year.

SEANA SMITH: So then I guess as we're preparing ourselves and trying to look out longer than maybe the next six months, how long do you expect us to be faced with this virus at this point, or how long should we prepare ourselves to be, at least?

AMESH ADALJA: This virus isn't going anywhere. It's going-- it's established itself in the human population. It's going to be present with us until there is a vaccine. So that may be maybe two years before the world is vaccinated. So we do have to think about how we're going to live with this vaccine, what balance we strike between the risk of this virus and our-- and going on with our lives. And it's going to be different for each person, based on their own values, what they think is essential, what they think is not essential. And it's not going to be one size fits all, and it's not going to be something that we can just proscribe that people do certain things.

SEANA SMITH: States are reopening. We talked about-- and Michael Cox actually mentioned this earlier in this show, just about the rise in the number of cases-- maybe it was Tom Hayes-- and just talking about how we are seeing more cases in some states that are reopening at this point. But it's not necessarily, what you say, the right metric to look at. What do you think is the right metric that we should examine going forward?

AMESH ADALJA: We have to look at hospital capacity. That's what social distancing was about. That's what flattening the curve is all about is staying underneath hospital capacity. So I don't look at the sheer number of cases. I look at what's going on in the hospitals, and I also look at the percent positivity of tests. How hard is it to find cases? Because if you see the percent positive number of cases going up, that may signal that you have an outbreak that's getting under-- out of control.

So those are the two metrics I look at. We have to expect that cases are going to go up. The virus hasn't changed biologically. And it's a simple fact that as people socially interact, you're going to get transmission events. So that's the wrong metric. Just look at hospital capacities. I think-- I keep saying over and over again, that's really what we're worried about, and that's where we have to gauge our social distancing based on.

SEANA SMITH: Do hospitals have the PPE equipment that will be needed in case we do see a surge in the number of cases?

AMESH ADALJA: We do-- we are in a better place now in May of 2020 than we were in March of 2020. There's been a lot of effort to get personal protective equipment supply chains to replenish the strategic national stockpile, to understand what hospital needs are. So I do think we're in a much better place. It may be challenging in the fall when we're dealing with both flu and coronavirus at the same time. But as of now, it seems that the hospital capacity problems are largely behind us and hopefully will remain behind us.

SEANA SMITH: Dr. Adalja, what's the feeling on the frontline now? I mean, a big worry that you and I had talked about in the past has been testing. We don't have access to enough tests. We've been debating about whether or not or how long it will be until we get there. What's the feeling now?

AMESH ADALJA: Testing is a whole world different and a lot better than it was back in March, for example. In my own personal experience, I've had no problem getting tests for individuals. Now we have an issue of trying to get people to come out and get tests because they're so used to not having a test that they paradoxically don't even come out to get tested. So we now need to encourage people to do testing.

And I think the supply problem has largely been solved. We may get some constraints later on. But right now, we're at a place where we want to be with testing. We're doing over 300,000 tests in the country every day. I think we can get even better at that, but it hopefully will not be a problem in the future.

SEANA SMITH: Dr. Adalja, today we had-- about President Trump threatening to permanently pull funding to the WHO, accusing it of favoring China. If funding from the WHO is withheld, just how does this complicate the global fight against COVID-19?

AMESH ADALJA: You have to remember that the WHO is the only pandemic resource the world has. And in the middle of a pandemic to try and threaten their funding over political issues and to put blame on them isn't the right thing to do. The WHO definitely needs reform. They definitely have a China problem where they were influenced by China, where they were slow to name a global health-- global-- a public health emergency of international concern and to recognize the pandemic.

They did give China a pass for some of their draconian measures of expelling journalists from "The New York Times," "The Washington Post," and "The Wall Street Journal," and they need to answer for that and their suppression of free speech. But this isn't the time to do it. The world needs the WHO to help serve a coordinating function in all these other countries where the WHO is the only resource. Remember, the developed world is going to see this virus as well.

SEANA SMITH: Dr. Adalja, do you think we need a better coordinated global response at this point? Do you think that will really enhance our fight against coronavirus?

AMESH ADALJA: I do think that we need to coordinate responses because an outbreak in one part of the world can affect another part of the world very, very quickly. So we want to make sure that we have situational awareness and that we have the ability to respond. And I don't think it's-- I think it's important, the United States had that information very early on without the WHO. So I don't think it's right to scapegoat the WHO. We had our own problems here, irrespective of whatever the WHO did or didn't do.

SEANA SMITH: All right, Dr. Amesh Adalja of Johns Hopkins, we love having you on the show. Thanks so much for taking the time today.

AMESH ADALJA: Thanks for having me.