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by teddyvangogh 2284 days ago
Forbes: Coronavirus Patient Dodged A Bullet With Hydroxychloroquine.

Mar 22, 2020,01:43pm EDT

"Two scientists at major university centers reviewed the French trial for me. They agreed, separately, that while the study is preliminary, small, and not without flaws, its findings were strong enough, given the drugs’ known safety records, to guide treatment decisions in a crisis.

“Despite the limitations of this study, in the absence of any effective treatment, in this urgent situation, this Plaquenil and Azithromycin combination therapy should be given to patients with COVID-19 as a treatment option,” Ying Zhang, a professor of microbiology at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, wrote in an email. “For now, there is no time to wait."

Brian Fallon, a research scientist and clinical trials investigator at the Columbia University Irving Medical Center, agreed on the study’s overall merit despite the patients who dropped out. After analyzing the data and counting all six dropouts as treatment failures, he said the overall rate of improvement was still statistically significant for the entire group, though not for the hydroxychloroquine group alone."

https://www.forbes.com/sites/marybethpfeiffer/2020/03/22/one...

3 comments

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22663274.
Not sure if you replied to the right message, but yeah there are safety risks that's why we evaluate them in trials. Favipiravir also has pretty bad side effects (teratogenic effects -thalidomide like). That's why we run these trials, and using already approved drugs or more widely developed drugs will mean we're dealing with known evils as opposed to unknown evils
It's not just hydroxychlroquine, the best results in the (albeit small) study were when it was paired with a Z-pack. A WSJ editorial had also talked about the same thing, but the Forbes article you posted has more details:

"The just-released French study reported that 70 percent of hydroxychloroquine-treated patients, or 14 of 20, were negative for the virus at day 6, as were all six patients who were treated with hydroxychloroquine and the antibiotic azithromycin (which Novins also received). But the study was small – 20 treated patients and 16 controls – and had other serious limitations."

Agree. This is interesting.

Covid-19: India Recommends Hydroxychloroquine As Prophylaxis For Healthcare Providers, Patient Family Members

https://swarajyamag.com/insta/covid-19-india-recommends-hydr...

the biggest limitation was that several pts in the treatment group went to the ICU and didn't continue to receive treatment, so we don't know how it affects the worst-case disease progression.