What's Happening Around Gimlet: Science Vs - Will Chloroquine Save Us?

March 30, 2020·25 min·1 clip

A couple in their 60s mixed aquarium chloroquine with soda — one survived, one died of heart failure.

These are not normal times. The Without Fail host says he is hunched in a coat closet with a towel over his head, recording while social distancing. So the show has to bend. Instead of bringing guests into the studio, Alex points listeners toward Gimlet episodes that respond to the coronavirus pandemic head on and from the side. One story centers on chloroquine. It follows how fear, uncertainty, and the hope of a treatment can outrun medicine. The stakes stop being theoretical fast. A couple takes a powdered substance, mixes it with soda, and gets sick within 30 minutes. The wife starts vomiting. Dan Brooks explains that vomiting may have kept her from absorbing more of the dangerous drug. Her husband gets worse quickly. His heart rhythm turns abnormal, emergency workers try to save him, and he dies in the emergency department. The segment does not scold. The host asks what was going through Brooks's mind, especially because he had tried to warn people first. Brooks says that after 20 years in poison center work, fear makes sense, even when the outcome is awful. Matthew Pullen broadens the view. As an infectious disease specialist at the University of Minnesota, he says uncertainty and limited options make fear understandable. The science is still unsettled. Pullen is part of a U.S. clinical trial testing whether chloroquine can help people with coronavirus. The episode keeps both truths in the room: high doses can be dangerous, and researchers were still studying whether the drug had any role for coronavirus.

As heard by us

A restrained look at chloroquine panic, medical uncertainty, and the real cost of acting on fear.

Chloroquine gets treated here less as a miracle-drug debate than as a lesson in how fear can turn thin evidence into dangerous action. Alex Bloomberg opens from a coat closet, with Without Fail handing the feed to Gimlet shows covering the coronavirus moment, before the episode…

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Why you'd press play

When fear outruns the science, you want a guide that keeps its head.

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