Citation From the March 18, 2020, edition of Fox News' Hannity
SEAN HANNITY (HOST): Dr. Hotez, let me go to you. You've been making very fascinating, interesting comments. I don't -- I'm not a doctor and I will not play one on TV, but you keep hearing about this malaria drug that has shown previously with SARS, which corona one, if you will, or corona-like virus that they've had a lot of success with, chloroquine phosphate. There's also talk about an Ebola drug that is showing some impact and other drugs that perhaps the president will be talking about tomorrow with the FDA, I would assume rapidly moving forward with the process. What can you tell us? Should we put hope in this? Some are saying, it would act almost like a prophylactic, protect people from getting it, or if they have it, studies have shown that, in fact, it will reduce the symptoms more quickly and less hospitalization time.
DR. PETER HOTEZ (TX CHILDREN'S HOSPITAL CENTER FOR VACCINE DEVELOPMENT): Yeah, I mean, I think, Sean, first of all, thanks for having me. I think what you are going to see in coming months is you're going to see the full horsepower of American science applied to this epidemic in the way of new vaccines, new drugs, new diagnostics, new innovative approaches. I mean, this is where America shines, big, audacious goals in the area of science coming out of our research universities and institutes. So, we've developed a vaccine that we're hoping to move into clinical trials over the next few weeks. There will be several other vaccines, but vaccines are going to take a while. That's probably at least a year, year and a half away, according to Dr. Fauci, and I think he's right. Maybe longer.
But there's still a lot we can do right now, and one of them is new antiviral drugs, which the timelines could be a lot quicker. And you mentioned chloroquine, there's some promising data coming out of my colleague Didier Raoult, who is out of southern France. And that could be potentially exciting if it holds up. And there's two reasons I'm kind of interested by it. One, the drug itself can show to inhibit virus replication in the test tube. That doesn't mean it works in the person. But it also has some anti-inflammatory effects. So, those two combined to make it a very intriguing drug, and there are some preliminary data.
So, we'll see how that moves along over the coming weeks in clinical trials. So, that's what I'm looking at. You mentioned some of the other antiviral drugs and also bringing on some antibody, isolated from recovered patients and using that as a therapy.
HANNITY: Yes.
HOTEZ: And even those prophylactics for our first responders. So, you're going to see a lot of things coming through, and again, this is -- this is where America is great.
HANNITY: Dr. Jackson, I mean, other antiviral drugs, for example, that were used with HIV or in this case, chloroquine, which we were talking about, again, a drug that was discovered many decades ago, used for malaria, others that have shown promise. What do you expect tomorrow in terms of what possible announcement the FDA will make with the president?
DR. RONNY JACKSON (FORMER WHITE HOUSE PHYSICIAN): Well, I think, Sean, you know, he's just going to -- the president has freed up a lot of money right now with the declaration of an emergency, he's freed up billions and billions of dollars that he can be used to jump into the private sector so that these companies can go out and they can afford to find these drugs that we're looking for. And I think the good news here is what the president is going to say is that he got rid of a lot of those regulations and standard operating procedures that made it difficult to push drugs out. We're going to focus on drugs that are already out there, that are being used for other diseases. That's going to really expedite things, because these drugs are -- most of them have already been proven safe in humans, so it's just going to be a matter of time and the ones that work and not having to prove that they are safe for human consumption.
So I think that's going to be a big part of it, and I think there's a lot of drugs that out there on the horizon right now, there's a lot of companies that are out there looking at it. And we're going to find something good, we're going to find something that works.