DONALD Trump has announced plans to bring online quickly a drug to treat coronavirus.

The long-used malaria and arthritis drug hydroxychloroquine will be made available “almost immediately” to patients with a prescription, he said during a coronavirus task force briefing.

The US Food and Drug Administration has slashed red tape to approve the use of the drug quickly, he added. It has had “very encouraging early results,” he said.

Existing off-the-shelf drugs that could tackle the virus, can be brought online faster than vaccines which can take up to 18 months to get sanctioned, because they have to go through a animal and human testing process. 

French researchers found that hydroxychloroquine, sold under the brand name Plaquenil,  lowered virus levels in most patients who took part in a clinical study this month.

“It has a lot of potential, though we’re not going on a lot of data yet,” Dr. Peter Hotez, the dean for the National School of Tropical Medicine at the Baylor School of Medicine, said of early studies of hydroxycholoroquine, a malaria drug developed in the 1940s.

It came as Mr Trump announced efforts to accelerate drugs to treat coronavirus and allow more Americans to access them.

"Immediate, like, as fast as we can get it," the president described the new treatment push, adding he is moving to obtain medicines made in other countries to lessen the deadly bug's severity.

The US Food and Drug Administration has worked to approve hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine much faster than normal to treat Covid-19, he said, saying it "won't kill anybody" even though it is a "very powerful drug" that has already "shown very, very encouraging early results." It will be issued by doctors as a prescription, the president said.

"I think it is going to be very exciting," he said. "It could be a gamechanger, or maybe not.  We want every American to know we are doing everything we can and these actions are important next steps."

On Tuesday, a team of French scientists released the first results of a clinical study of the use of hydroxychloroquine on 24 coronavirus patients from southeast France.

The research team, led by Didier Raoult, a renowned infectious disease expert from l’Institut Hospitalo-Universitaire in Marseille, administered the drug for 10 days along with azithromycin, a common antibiotic.

Researchers said the drugs cleared the virus in the nose and throat of most observed patients in three to six days. The study found that after six days of treatment, 70% of patients administered hydroxychloroquine were clear of the virus, compared to just 12.5 percent of patients who were not given drugs.

Azithromycin boosted the effect of hydroxychloroquine, according to the study. After six days of treatment, all patients treated with the drug combination “were virologically cured,” compared to 57.1 percent of patients treated with hydroxycholorquine by itself.

“We therefore recommend that COVID-19 patients be treated with hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin to cure their infection and to limit the transmission of the virus to other people in order to curb the spread of COVID-19 in the world,” wrote researchers, who acknowledged the small sample size of the study.

Mr Raoult’s findings prompted the French Minister of Health  on Tuesday to approve expanded treatment trials, with one commencing in Lille.

Stephen Hahn, the Commissioner of Food and Drugs in the US since December 2019 referred to convalescent plasma as a potential therapy for Covid-19 which he described as "an exciting area".

"If you have been exposed to coronavirus and your are better, we can collect the blood concentrate that, and have the ability once it is virus free, to give that to other patients and that immune response could potentially prove a benefit," he said.

French multinational pharmaceutical company Sanofi is assessing the risk and benefit of hydroxychloroquine for the management of coronavirus.

According to the company, some health authorities are allowing the temporary use of chloroquine for the management of Covid-19, but there is insufficient data to draw any conclusions over its efficacy. Any use of the drug in this context is considered “off-label” use.

World Health Organization officials were asked at a press briefing last month0about chloroquine, which is closely related to hydroxychloroquine.

Dr. Janet Diaz, a WHO official, responded: “For chloroquine there is no proof that that is an effective treatment at this time. We recommend that therapeutics be tested under ethically approved clinical trials to show efficacy and safety.”