hydroxychloroquine

Why would non-medical government officials be pushing something when doctors tell them not to? It boggles the mind.

Story on the French doctor who started all this.

To answer the question: If Hydroxychloroquine improves outcomes in patients, then it has a benefit. If the benefits outweigh any negative side effect, then it should be used. Any other speculation is silly. There are several drugs that suppress the immune system that are given to patients with infectious diseases because they have been shown to have benefits that outweigh the cost.

The only way to tell if this is the case is do large scale controlled scientific experiments. From what I have read, there have been a couple of small-scale studies that have suggested a benefit of this drug for covid-19 patients (i.e. people who are under medical care because they already have the disease), and one that didn't. At this point none of the studies are scientifically significant.

This is a scientific question that needs to be answered scientifically. The political bickering doesn't help.

Is death a new health benefit to taking medicine that shouldn't be taken for a disease it was never meant for? That's a fun way to look at things.

Dying from an overdose of meds you shouldn't be taking in the first place? How is that political?

Chloroquine: Trump's misleading claims spark hoarding and overdoses

The liberals here are just as ridiculous as the conservatives. This is a scientific question, not a political one.

If scientific research shows that hydroxycholoroquine is effective as part of a medical treatment under the care of doctors. And if doctors determine that the benefits to patients based on solid scientific research outweigh the risks.

Then why wouldn't you support it? You don't know all the facts. No one knows the facts... the research hasn't been completed yet.

There is a possiblity that this drug might be useful as part of treatment for covid-19. I don't see Fauci, or any other responsible expert disputing this.

Small Trial Suggests Antimalarial Drugs Not Effective For Treating Coronavirus
KATHERINE SELEY-RADTKE, THE CONVERSATION 6 APRIL 2020

On Saturday the Food and Drug Administration approved the use of two antimalarial drugs, hydroxychloroquine and a related medication, chloroquine, for emergency use to treat COVID-19. The drugs were touted by President Trump as a "game changer" for COVID-19.

However, a study just published in a French medical journal provides new evidence that hydroxychloroquine does not appear to help the immune system clear the coronavirus from the body.

The study comes on the heels of two others - one in France and one in China - that reported some benefits in the combination of hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin for COVID-19 patients who didn't have severe symptoms of the virus.

I am a medicinal chemist who has specialized in discovery and development of antiviral drugs for the past 30 years, and I have been actively working on coronaviruses for the past seven.

I am among a number of researchers who are concerned that this drug has been given too much of a high priority before there is enough evidence to show it is indeed effective.

There are already other clinical studies that showed it is not effective against COVID-19 as well as several other viruses. And, more importantly, it can have dangerous side effects, as well as giving people false hope.

The latter has led to widespread shortages of hydroxychloroquine for patients who need it to treat malaria, lupus and rheumatoid arthritis, the indications for which it was originally approved.

The idea that the combination of hydroxychloroquine with an antibiotic drug, azithromycin, was effective against COVID-19 gained more attention after a study published on March 17. This study described a trial of 80 patients carried out by Philippe Gautret in Marseille, France.

Although some of their results appeared to be encouraging, it should also be noted that most of their patients only had mild symptoms. Furthermore, 85 percent of the patients didn't even have a fever – one of the major telltale symptoms of the virus, thus suggesting that these patients likely would have naturally cleared the virus without any intervention.

In another study, posted on medRxiv, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, Chinese scientists from Renmin Hospital of Wuhan University, in Wuhan, China, gave hydroxychloroquine to patients with only mild infections who were free of medical issues, similar to the Gautret study. The results showed that the 31 patients who received the drug showed a lessening of their symptoms 24 hours earlier than patients in the control group.

In addition, pneumonia symptoms improved in 25 of the 31 patients versus 17 of 31 in the control group. As noted in several of the comments associated with the manuscript, there are issues related to the translation of the paper, thus clouding interpretations of some of the results. The paper also appears to focus more on pneumonia than COVID-19. However, these issues may be cleared up or addressed once the paper finishes the peer-review process.

But two other studies have conflicting results.

A second French group, led by Jean-Michel Molina, has now tested the hydroxychloroquine-azithromycin combination treatment in 11 patients at the Hôpital Saint-Louis in Paris, France, and their results were strikingly different.

Like the Marseille study, the Molina trial was also a small pilot study. Molina and colleagues used the same dosing regimen as Gautret. In contrast, however, to the Gautret study, eight of the 11 patients had underlying health conditions, and 10 of 11 had fevers and were quite ill at the time the dosing began.

These Paris researchers found that after five to six days of treatment with hydroxychloroquine (600 mg per day for 10 days) and azithromycin (500 mg on day 1 and 250 mg on days 2 to 5), eight of the 10 patients still tested positive for COVID-19.

Of these 10 patients, one patient died, two were transferred to the ICU and another had to be removed from the treatment due to serious complications.

In addition, a similar study in China also showed no difference in viral clearance after seven days either with or without the hydroxychloroquine with the patients in the trial. This supports Molina's findings.

Thus, despite the recent approval of this drug for use against COVID-19, questions remain as to the efficacy of this treatment.

As Molina and colleagues note: "Ongoing randomized clinical trials with hydroxychloroquine should provide a definitive answer regarding the alleged efficacy of this combination and will assess its safety." The Conversation

Katherine Seley-Radtke, Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry and President-Elect of the International Society for Antiviral Research, University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

1) Does anyone here think that there has been enough scientific research to answer this question?

2) Would anyone where reject the science, if the research showed a real net benefit to the use of hydroxychloroquine for covid-9 patients?

It seems like people are lining up in their usual political bubbles on this scientific question. The scientists (even in Neptune's article) are saying the jury is still out.

I am not going to take a definitive position on this until the research is done.

Geez Louise......that's freaking brilliant...I never would have figured that out, but it makes perfect sense now that you've gone all preteen mean-girl. If I understand this correctly, some U/I woman no longer loved her husband, and she hates Trump because she's suffering from a virus so she didn't actually ingest the democrat but Blatham hates her husband AND he ingested .... no..wait...nobody ingested....just everybody hates Trump except McG and blatham poisoned some lady's husband because he won the coin toss. That about sum it all up????

Do you work for OANN???? don't be shy