“I take a pill every day,” he said, adding that he combines this with zinc.

Asked why, he said: “Because I think it’s good. I’ve heard a lot of good stories”.

Hydroxychloroquine hopes dashed as finds no advantage in Covid-19 fight

Trump has shown interest for weeks in promoting the use of hydroxychloroquine, even if some doctors think it does not work for coronavirus patients and US government regulators warn it has “not been shown to be safe.”

Trump’s latest remarks came out of the blue, immediately grabbing headlines on a day when US deaths from Covid-19 topped 90,000 people – almost a third of the total world toll.

“You’d be surprised at how many people are taking it, especially the front-line workers, before you catch it. The front-line workers – many, many are taking it. I happen to be taking it,” he let slip to reporters attending a White House meeting devoted to the struggling restaurant industry.

“I’m taking it, hydroxychloroquine, right now, yeah. A couple of weeks ago, I started taking it,” he said.

Trump has often played down the dangers of coronavirus, including last week when he said it threatened only a small number of people. He also pointedly refuses to wear a mask, despite federal recommendations to do so and the fact that most of his staff have taken to covering their faces in public.

A personal valet to Trump has tested positive for the coronavirus, as has Katie Miller, Vice-President Mike Pence’s press secretary.

Hydroxychloroquine as coronavirus ‘cure’: did France’s Macron fall for the hype?

Trump said his use of the medicine was approved by the White House physician. However, he insisted that he, not the doctor, took the first step.

“I asked him: ‘what do you think?’ He said ‘if you’d like it’. I said ‘yeah, I’d like it’.”

Trump said he has received many “positive calls” from people, whom he did not identify, telling him about the malaria drug. He mentioned a letter he’d received from a New York doctor, also unidentified, who reported giving the medicine to hundreds of patients and “I haven’t lost one”.

By contrast, the government’s Food and Drug Administration warns against giving hydroxychloroquine for either prevention or treatment of the coronavirus, noting reported side effects including “serious heart rhythm problems in patients with Covid-19”. Only emergency use is authorised under temporary rules.

Earlier this month, a medical paper out of New York suggested that combining hydroxychloroquine with the dietary supplement zinc sulphate, which has antiviral properties, could create a more effective treatment against coronavirus.

But Matthew Heinz, an Arizona doctor who served under Barack Obama’s government, said medicines like hydroxychloroquine are not “benign” and open for unregulated use.

“I cannot stress enough how reckless it is to encourage anybody to take hydroxychloroquine or any other unproven remedy,” he said.

Fox News anchor Neil Cavuto warned it could kill people who were in certain health risk populations.

“The fact of the matter is though, when the president said ‘what have you got to lose?’, in a number of studies, those certain vulnerable population has one thing to lose: their lives,” Cavuto said.

“I cannot stress enough. This will kill you”.

Trump signalled, as he has throughout the crisis, that there was nothing to lose by trying possible treatments.

“It seems to have an impact, and maybe it does, maybe it doesn’t but if it doesn’t, you’re not going to get sick or die,” Trump said. “I take a pill every day. At some point I’ll stop.”

A few studies have pointed to an increase in heart problems from hydroxychloroquine and the FDA has cautioned about its potentially dangerous adverse effects.

The president has a common heart disease, with a build-up of plaque in his blood vessels, according to records the White House released after his 2018 physical exam.

Trump, who is 73 years old, should not be taking it “especially in his age group and his, shall we say, weight group”, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said. She described Trump as “morbidly obese” during an interview with CNN host Anderson Cooper on Monday.

White House physicals have placed Trump slightly above the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention’s requirements for being “obese”.

Some on Twitter took their criticism of Trump’s reveal a step further on Monday, using GIFs and references to Flintstone Vitamins – a suggestion that Trump wasn’t really being given hydroxychloroquine, but chewable multivitamins for children in instead.

Agence France-Presse and Tribune News Service