 Now, to date, no confirmed treatment for patients with coronavirus has been found. President Trump, though, has been promoting a drug used against malaria for use in the United States. Hydroxychloroquine is one of the oldest and best-known anti-malarial drugs, randomized trials into whether it might work have been commissioned by the British government from research laboratories in Oxford, but those will need time to produce results. So, is the president right and what is known about the drug's effectiveness? Well, Professor Nick White joins me live from Bangkok. He's Professor of Tropical Medicine at Mahadol University in Thailand and also the University of Oxygen. President Trump says, well, you might as well try it. It's not going to do you any harm. Is he right on any front? He's not right about that. We really do not know whether chloroquine or hydroxychloroquine are beneficial or indeed harmful. Obviously, we wouldn't be doing the trials if we didn't think there was some chance that they would work and because they're old and well-tried drugs, they should be reasonably easy to deploy. But at this stage, the honest answer is we really don't know. And the only way to find out is through carefully conducted randomized trials. What are the signs, though, that it does work? Well, these compounds have some activity in laboratory testing against a broad range of viruses, not just the SARS-CoV-2, but the evidence that they have clinical benefit really is very light. And to make a decision that people should take them either for prevention or treatment, on the basis of the evidence, we have to date, is unwise. Are there side effects? Well, there are side effects to all drugs. These drugs are reasonably well tolerated in the right doses, but we've already seen misguided self-administration as a result of this publicity, leading to people to kill themselves by mistake. So they're not harmless, they're dangerous and overdose, they're reasonably safe, but honestly, we need to find out do they work, yes or no, before we can recommend them. When you look at the supply chain for these drugs, is that being put under pressure now and is it at risk for the people who genuinely need these drugs? Absolutely. Because these drugs were very good for malaria before resistance arose. There were a lot made. There were approximately 300 metric tonnes were manufactured every year for over a half a century. But as the drugs have fallen to resistance, the manufacturing's gone down. There might be as little as 25 metric tonnes, sounds a lot, but it's not when you spread it out across the whole world. So we would need to ramp up back to those malaria levels where we'd be able to supply it to everybody. So there is certainly a problem of supply and that's affecting the people who need it today. These drugs have another interesting and beneficial property and that's in people with rheumatological diseases, such as rheumatoid arthritis or lupus. These people need these drugs and already, particularly in resource constrained settings, people can't get them because of this hype over their potential benefit.