In the category of snake-oil medicine, you may have heard that something called oleandrin is now being pushed by members of the Trump Administration as a treatment for Covid-19. You may even be considering getting some, just in case.
Don’t.
From Dr. Steven Novella of Yale University School of Medicine on his blog Science-Based Medicine:
Let’s take a look at oleandrin specifically to see where we are with the science. Oleandrin is a chemical derived from the plant, oleandra (Nerium oleander). As an aside, many people may know this plant from the game Red Dead Redemption II, where it is plant that can be harvested and used to make poison. It is a beautiful Mediterranean plant used around the world for landscaping. Every part of the plant is poisonous, containing the powerful cardiac toxin, oleandrin. This can lead to cardiac arrhythmias and can be fatal.
But Novella is good. He’s been part of the skeptical movement – the good one, not the bad ones – for decades, so he knows when to be skeptical and when to accept. More importantly, not only does he know about the gigantic hole in FDA regulations through which dangerous supplements are pushed, he also knows the tricks of the trade of the snake oil peddler. I’m not going to repeat his words – go read them for yourself. But it’s important to get this bit out:
The science made public so far is a single pre-clinical study, showing that oleandrin has anti-viral activity against SARS-CoV-2 in a test tube (the study is pre-print and has not been peer-reviewed). That’s it. This is another common feature of the snake oil industry – tout products based upon preclinical data only. This kind of data may seem promising, and allows snake oil peddlers to claim their products are backed by scientific studies. But this kind of in-vitro study tells us very little about the activity of potential drugs in living organisms. Very, very few compounds that have “promising” activity in vitro go on to become useful medicinals.
The good ship Ethics appears to be in trouble.
In some ways, this is worse than the hydroxychloroquine scam with which Trump and his senior advisor, Dr. (but not of medicine, but of economics) Peter Navarro jumped off the Cliff of Ethics into the Ocean of Disaster. At least a small study of hydroxychloroquine had been run in living people, as I recall, as poorly designed as that study was.
This pre-clinical study is even further down the ladder all drugs should climb before being made available to the public.
But this is characteristic of the quality of people now inhabiting the Republican Party. Lincoln’s burial spin rate must be increasing as each day passes.
