More recently, a Chinese study suggested no effect from the pills.

But that hasn’t stopped a segment of Trump’s supporters from loudly trumpeting the drug’s potential. Some have started calling the combination of hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin, another commonly available drug, “Trump Pills.” Twitter has deleted tweets from Trump allies like Giuliani, Ingraham and conservative campus organizer Charlie Kirk for touting the drug as a “promising cure,” citing the lack of scientific evidence backing it.

The initial paper was even deleted, after Google decided it had violated its terms of service.

Still, subsequent anecdotal reports have bolstered some people’s belief in the drug. An upstate New York doctor in a Hasidic Jewish community claimed he cured hundreds of coronavirus patients with the drug. “Hawaii Five-0” and “Lost” star Daniel Dae Kim claimed hydroxychloroquine was his “secret weapon” in his fight against the coronavirus.

The sudden, intense interest in the drug has had downsides. A man died after ingesting a drug normally given to fish in the belief that one of its ingredients, chloroquine phosphate, was the drug that Trump had touted. It’s also led to a shortage of the drug for lupus and arthritis patients who take the medicine regularly. Separately, researchers fret that the hyperfocus on one drug will hamper the development of other potential treatments.

“There's only so much we can do at one time, right? The bandwidth for scientific research is not infinite,” Harvard’s Donovan said.

“The downstream effects of this is it causes major disruptions in our medical system,” she added. “Families that have to call in and advocate for their family members who are hospitalized, because they heard the name of this drug, are going to advocate to try to get this drug to their family member when it might not be the best option at that time.”

Through official channels, the FDA and New York state have dramatically ramped up trials for hydroxychloroquine, ordering millions of doses of the drug and conducting wide-scale clinical trials. The FDA also authorized emergency use of the drug for coronavirus patients — a move that makes it easier to use the drug but is not an endorsement of the drug’s effectiveness in fighting the illness.

Medical researchers have encouraged these further studies of hydroxychloroquine but cautioned that scientific standards must be maintained.

“This desire to quickly find safe and effective treatments may … lead to relaxed standards of data generation and interpretation, which may have undesirable downstream effects,” a group of researchers recently wrote in the Annals of Internal Medicine, a medical journal.

That hasn’t stopped some of Trump’s supporters pushing to fast-track the drug even further.

Michael Coudrey, a Twitter commentator popular in pro-Trump circles, has been one of the movement’s most vocal hydroxychloroquine boosters, frequently celebrating various advances in the drug’s usage. A former far-right journalist who describes himself as a “biopharmaceutical analyst,” Coudrey said in an interview that he believes clinical trials were not necessary — anecdotal evidence was enough.

“Due to the time-sensitivity of patients in critical care, we do not have the ability to wait for clinical testing and official FDA approval of hydroxychloroquine for specific use to treat Covid-19 patients,” he said.

Jack Posobiec, a host for the Trump-friendly One America News Network and voluble pro-Trump pundit on Twitter, said some conservatives were understandably glomming on to a possible solution to a desperate situation.

“People were looking for a magic bullet that would take out this bug quickly,” he said in an interview. “But I don’t think there’s anything more serious than telling people which medicine to take to cure themselves in the middle of a global pandemic.”

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