A man has died and a woman is in critical condition after ingesting a chemical that contained chloroquine, which Donald Trump has promoted as a coronavirus treatment despite warnings from health officials that it has not been proven to treat the virus.

The Banner health system in Arizona reported that a man and a woman, a couple in their 60s, had swallowed chloroquine phosphate, a common aquarium cleaner, 30 minutes before being admitted to a hospital.

Dr Daniel Brooks, Banner Poison and Drug Information Center medical director, said: “Given the uncertainty around Covid-19, we understand that people are trying to find new ways to prevent or treat this virus, but self-medicating is not the way to do so ... The last thing that we want right now is to inundate our emergency departments with patients who believe they found a vague and risky solution that could potentially jeopardize their health.”

Pharmaceutical-approved chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine can be prescribed as an antimalarial drug under a variety of brand names, and some researchers are testing its effectiveness in treating coronavirus. No drug has been proven to treat the virus and a vaccine could be months away.

But the president has repeatedly suggested that the drug is a “game changer” against coronavirus while members of his own administration have shot down those assertions.

FDA Commissioner Dr Stephen Hahn said chloroquine phosphate will be used in clinical trials to test its effectiveness but saying otherwise would give Americans “false hope” against the outbreak, which has sickened thousands across the US.

He said: ”We will collect that data and make the absolute right decisions based upon those data about the safety and efficacy of the treatments. ... We may have the right drug, but it might not be in the appropriate dosage form right now, and it might do more harm than good.”

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Asked last week whether the drug looked promising, Dr Anthony Fauci contradicted the president and said that ”the answer is no” because “the evidence you’re talking about ... is anecdotal evidence.”

He said: “We’re trying to strike a balance between making something with a potential of an effect to the American people available, at the same time that we do it under the auspices of a protocol that would give us information to determine if it’s truly safe and truly effective. ... It was not done in a controlled clinical trial. So you really can’t make any definitive statement about it.”

New York will begin trials with week using 70,000 doses of hydroxychloroquine and 750,000 doses of chloroquine.