Study Shows Hydroxychloroquine is ineffective Against COVID-19

Dear Trump voters, please put down the fish tank cleaner. It was never going to protect you against COVID-19. And neither will chloroquine.

Yeah just don't try taking the one for your aquarium.

One thing that seems to help is the prone position which apparently makes breathing easier for COVID patients. Not a cure, but good to know.

SHHHH, R1! SHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!

Obviously, these researchers didn't factor in Trump's "good feeling" about the effectiveness of this drug for COVID-19 patients.

Thank god, R3; now maybe some people will learn what "prone" really means.

The title says hydroxychloroquine but the story says the test used chloroquine. Which is it? It’s hydroxychloroquine in conjunction with azithromycin that is supposed to work.

I think they're lying just to throw off the public, so the rich and well connected can buy up the supplies and be cured.

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

We are fucked.

R7, the underlying study, linked in the article, makes it clear that it’s hydroxychloroquine that was studied.

Moral: don't take your medical advice from DONALD FUCKING TRUMP.

R9, it's all right, there are literally hundreds of clinical trials going on right now to address COVID-19.

Lowlife Trump should be put in prison because of his misinformation that he quotes....he is a complete liar, a piece of shit.

I want the liar and his team of liars, dead. Where are the mask?

[R12] , but this was the one the was the most promising. Chinese and Italian doctors were saying it was working. Big Pharna thought it was working too. Now, in RTC it does not work. This is very bad.

This is the worse news ever.

That was a study of 30 people. These studies sure don't seem to include very many people. The French one was 20 people.

I think Trump voters should do as their boss says. Just follow his advice, you will be fine.

By the way, Pence keeps saying supplies are heading into the hospitals. That is not true.

I think we can surmise that Trump and/or some member of his family was treated with this by an elite doctor and it worked. Have you seen any member of the Trump family since that fatal birthday bash at Mar-a-Lago?

R16, that’s correct. I don’t know how much time doctors have to conduct any real studies when they don’t even have enough equipment to keep patients alive.

What is clear though is that not one of those 30 patients who were treated with chloroquine recovered and walked out of the hospital on their own. And that’s the bad news.

The study didn't say it's "ineffective", the study said it doesn't make much of a difference to the outcome for patients who are SERIOUSLY ILL AND HOSPITALIZED.

There's still two other major scenarios to consider:

1. Whether taking it at the first sign of symptoms can reduce the risk that it will BECOME bad enough to require hospitalization.

2. Whether taking it prior to (and during) exposure can prevent infection in the first place.

For what it's worth, that's PRECISELY the case with Tamiflu. If you wait until you're already sick, Tamiflu makes almost no meaningful difference. If you take it at the first sniffle, it can prevent it from becoming much worse than a sniffle. And if you take Tamiflu before you're even exposed to influenza, it can prevent infection (just like Truvada for PrEP).

If anything, the moral so far seems to be, "start taking HCQ at the first sign of infection... or sooner, if you can, as long as you don't have arrhythmia or psychiatric issues that would otherwise contraindicate its use."

[quote]The French one was 20 people.

The French study that showed it working was a complete fraud. It wasn't peer reviewed; it was led by someone known to have played fast and loose with data before; they removed the people from the study who got worse, and the journal it was published in was controlled by the fraud.

[quote]Raoult's paper on alleged #chloroquine cure of #COVID19 had rigged, omitted or even falsified data and was published without peer review in a journal he controls. Trial was not randomized, controlled or blinded in any way.

More:

[quote]Of the 26 patients initially given the drug, 6 were excluded from the final results including 3 that were transferred to the ICU and 1 that died. IOW, the worst outcomes.

R20, if I’m drowning and you try to rescue me but I still die, wouldn’t you call your efforts ineffective?

“A week after the treatments started both groups were evaluated and results showed that no measurable difference in the progression of the disease.”

And:

“Results from a controlled clinical trial from China on the use of hydroxy chloroquine as a treatment for Covid-19 have shown no significant differences in health outcomes between the control group and patients who received the experimental drug.“

Fact is that it’s not the miracle drug that it’s been made out to be by Trump, and there is no data to support his theory. There are multiple mediation trials that are being conducted at the current time, and to single out one specific treatment and tout it as “the” cure without having any data to back up this assertion is simply irresponsible.

Ugh. I hate Trump but I was really hoping he was right about this. Now I'm feeling less optimistic...hopefully they'll figure something out.

Thanks, Trump

Oh, dear God in heaven, please have pity on one fat whore who stockpiled $10k worth of hydroxychloroquine the other day. Jealous, bitch? hahahahahahaha

[quote] It’s hydroxychloroquine in conjunction with azithromycin that is supposed to work.

People need to read the article. This study DID NOT use hydroxychloroquine with azithromycin. This was just a study using hydro on its own.

Additionally it was *one* study, from China no less. These kinds of articles are unhelpful with something as complicated as pharmaceutical trials.

Breitbart seems really enthusiastic about the chloroquine/azithromycin combo and they have multiple articles praising this miracle cure.

Shouldn’t we have much more promising data by now if that was the case? Fact is, there is NO current effective cure.

I hate when people get their hopes up only to be disappointed. I’m not saying it doesn’t work; the available data that’s currently available to us says that it doesn’t work.

R27, that's because Breitbart has its tongue firmly up Trump's ass. Of course, they're going to praise that combo.

[quote]If anything, the moral so far seems to be, "start taking HCQ at the first sign of infection... or sooner, if you can, as long as you don't have arrhythmia or psychiatric issues that would otherwise contraindicate its use."

No, R20, that's not the moral. The moral is don't believe a fraudulent study and don't go all in on a treatment that isn't intended for the illness you're treating, particularly when doing so causes that drug to be in short supply and, hence, not available to those who legitimately need it.

I can replace "HCQ" in your sentence above with "grape Kool-Aid" and it would be just as accurate.

[quote]Fact is that it’s not the miracle drug that it’s been made out to be by Trump

Anybody that would put any faith into the words that come out of that fatfuck's mouth deserve what they get. Fool me once, shame on you; fool me hundreds upon hundreds of times... and maybe you should start seeking someone else's opinion.

R25 AND She was an MD too! Served her right for abusing her script privilege.

Well, hydro and azt are treatments for malaria. So at least, the medication can be used for another illness to save lives.

Fauci did appear to us like it was not going to work. So you do you believe one of the leading virologists in the world, or the cheetolini.

Even if HCQ is demonstrated to be not particularly effective, I think it's still going to end up getting widely taken for PrEP for no reason besides the fact that it's dirt cheap and relatively safe. If I could get my hands on it right now, fuck YEAH I'd be taking it, because ~50c/pill @ 2/day is a really, really cheap insurance policy if it ends up being even slightly effective as PrEP... even if my insurance wouldn't pay a cent, it's throw-away money for peace of mind.

A potentially better drug that would cost hundreds or thousands of dollars out of pocket? THEN, I'd probably have to be definitely sick before I'd spend the money.

Another thing the breathless news reports against it haven't really touched upon... you MIGHT have to combine it with supplemental zinc to really work well... maybe a LOT of supplemental zinc. The latest theory I read today is that it's actually zinc that does most of the work, and the main thing HCQ does is improve the ability of zinc to get taken up into cells.

This is one of the big historical problems with drug trials... a lot of them focus on monotherapy, and end up missing drugs that might actually be really good when COMBINED.

Perfect case in point: HIV. If you take emtricitabine or lamivudine alone, you'll barely even notice a drop in viral load before developing resistance within 3-8 weeks. Take tenofovir alone, and it might last 6-18 months before it poops out and the virus mutates around it. Take protease inhibitors alone, and you'd need to ingest an amount that would itself almost kill you before the HIV did. The magic happens when ALL THREE are combined to attack the same virus from different angles.

Ditto, for herpes. Acyclovir alone is better than nothing... barely. Valtrex is marginally better, but still pretty weak. Combine Valtrex with supplemental L-Lysine, and it can suppress outbreaks for years.

(n.b., I have neither HIV nor herpes, but I'm presenting both as examples of drugs and drugs + supplements that work significantly better in combination than they do individually).

So funny to see all the Trump cultists grasping at straws. They’re so desperate for their Leader to be proven right.

But he’s not.

Nature bats last.

A NY doctor reported that he had NO deaths and outstanding recovery results from using THREE different drugs including Hydroxychloroquine, and NOT just the latter.

those doctors are using malaria treatment protocols. But, it is not working.

r35, exactly. It doesn't HAVE to be either/or. If I get Covid-19, I want EVERYTHING... hydroxychloroquine, azithromycin, Avigan/favipiravir, AND tocilizumab. Someday, when we've had time to find more/better drugs, I could be picky. Right now, given the opportunity I'd just hedge my personal bets on everything.

If I could get my hands on it RIGHT NOW, I'd unhesitatingly be taking 200mg of HCQ twice/day for a few days, once/day for a few more weeks, then once every 3-4 days thereafter for the next few months as PrEP. Maybe it would work, maybe it wouldn't, but worst-case, I'd be throwing away $10/week on something that would at least reduce my anxiety level as a useful placebo.

The fact is, right now, every last doctor, nurse, and hospital worker in the US who can get their hands (officially, unofficially, or otherwise) on hydroxychloroquine is taking it for PrEP speaks far more loudly about its perceived value than gripes about a lack of clear evidence. "Quality evidence" is what you wait for when there are better options potentially available, or when you have people to experiment upon who can't push back if you say 'no' and stick them in a 'placebo' group. The sad fact is, there are entire poor third-world countries that are going to end up being the control cases for unmedicated, unchecked spread regardless of whether they want to be or not. There's no need to arbitrarily withhold meds from people in wealthier countries just for the sake of creating an artificial 'control' group, because THAT group is coming ANYWAY.

Look at it this way... there's also weak evidence that n-acetylcysteine has much impact on the outcome of pneumonia, or respiratory illnesses in general. People still take shitloads of it, just because it's there, and because at worst, it's throwing away a relatively small amount of money. Ditto for expectorants. Despite marketing to the contrary, there's basically zero quality evidence that guaifenesin actually makes any difference to the outcome of a cold, flu, or pneumonia. People still buy and take shitloads of it every time they get a respiratory infection.

Hell, just look at phenyleprine... the shitty replacement ingredient used in today's OTC decongestants. It has LITERALLY never been formally tested. The FDA allowed its substitution with basically NO evidence that it was even useful, let alone as good as the pseudoephedrine HCl it replaced, and ABUNDANT evidence that it's somewhere between "useless" and "useless, with mildly harmful side effects".

Twenty years ago, we had decongestants that actually WORKED... the ones that used phenylpropanaolamine. Unfortunately, they also caused women to have strokes they wouldn't have otherwise had, so OTC cold medicines were all reformulated. I think the DEA also pushed hard, because PPA could easily be used as an ingredient to make amphetamines (not sure about actual crystal meth, though). Then, 20 years later, the DEA did the same thing with pseudoephedrine (though since it couldn't convince the FDA to ban it due to actual health risks, it settled for making it stupidly expensive, so NOW you have to pay twenty bucks for a dozen tablets, instead of being able to buy a cheap bottle of generic pseudoephedrine tablets big enough to last for 3 years for $1.99.

My point is, there's a LOT of shit we take for respiratory infections that has literally NEVER rigorously had its efficacy proven, and half the stuff in today's "cold medicines" has never even had anybody PRETEND to test its efficacy. Hell, look at all the fucking useless "Homeopathic" shit now sold at otherwise-respectable stores like Walgreens and CVS that is made with LITERAL goddamn fucking WATER, based on fucking "faith" that the historical presence of some molecule in the "foundation" water had some magical effect (seriously. Google "homeopathy" to see just how useless anything with that label is).

Very interesting post, R37, thanks. Do you by chance know what are the potential side effects of “hydroxychloroquine, azithromycin, Avigan/favipiravir, and tocilizumab”? I mean, I know that even taking too much of seemingly innocuous things like Vitamin C can have fatal side effects. But are those pills high-risk or are they usually safe as long as people don’t overdose and are monitored by a doctor? Can one theoretically take them as a prophylactic?

I’m just brainstorming a just-in-case scenario if any of my older relatives catch the virus. Maybe they can sign up for a trial - might be better giving it a try than just giving up.

With the exception of HCQ (with or without azithromycin), the other meds are all WAY too expensive to take for prophylaxis, and will likely stay that way for many many years.

Back when Tamiflu was $200+ for 10 capsules, literally NOBODY who wasn't at certain risk of death if they caught influenza actually took it for prophylaxis, even though its efficacy for that purpose was well-known and generally undisputed. It was just too expensive. And insurance companies wouldn't cover prophylactic use at all. Hell, BCBS of Florida STILL won't cover it for prophylactic use, so every December I end up spending around $150 out of pocket for three $50 rounds of 10 capsules to avoid getting sick during the holidays.

There will be shortages of HCQ for a few weeks, but if it ends up being even anecdotally effective for prophylaxis, and especially if C19 keeps being randomly severe for people outside of the usual risk groups, I guarantee it'll be readily available within a few months. It's not a hard or complicated drug to synthesize, it's just somewhat limited in quantity at this moment because a year ago, it was a cheap, unprofitable old drug that almost nobody bought anymore, so few companies were even interested in bothering to MAKE it.

Imagine, for a moment, if MRSA suddenly began sweeping America and minor cuts & scrapes became limb-threatening injuries... then someone accidentally discovered that mercurochrome somehow cured it effectively. Overnight, stores would be wiped out of what little stock they actually have (AFAIK, in the US, the FDA delisted it without banning it, so you can still find it on the "ethnic/traditional remedies" shelf in small pharmacies, but it's been gone from the "first aid" aisle at stores like Walgreens and CVS for years), and people would be selling it for $10,000/bottle on eBay until eBay pulled the plug on them. Then, a few months later, you'd be able to cheaply buy it everywhere, because there would be two dozen companies manufacturing it by the tankload.

meanwhile, if you need chloroquine to treat lupus...

[quote] So funny to see all the Trump cultists grasping at straws

People who care about their own health and the health others are interested in learning and understanding what the latest news is about possible effective treatments.

A doctor I work with was pretty skeptical (as was Fauci)......so, not surprised. Couldn’t understand why everyone was being so hopeful this week, except I’m sure it was what they wanted to hear.

Convalescent plasma is looking like the most likely bridge to vaccine.

That's not what you're doing, though, r41. You are, indeed, grasping at straws and believing total bullshit, like the fool above who insists that he'd be taking random drugs repeatedly now if he could get his hands on them.

That's not "learning and understanding."

R43, it’s not “total bullshit”. The UK government has announced that it’s stopping all exports of HCQ in order to have enough in-country supplies of it in case it helps Covid-19 patients. Many other governments announced the same.

Unlike OP, I’m not going to put all my trust in some random “study” from China and the Chinese government.

R44, I’m not putting my trust into any government. We’re discussing the latest available study regarding chloroquine, nothing more. There is no hidden agenda, I’m just positing the latest available update.

There’s no need for emotionally charged arguments. It’s science. Feel free to show me a newer study that shows a different result. I hope there is one since we are all hoping for a cure.

In the case of HCQ, there IS a plausible theoretical basis for it working: it appears to facilitate uptake of zinc into cells, interfering with viral replication.

There's also a plausible theoretical basis for HCQ+azithromycin to work at least slightly better... it prevents viral pneumonia from turning into opportunistic viral + bacterial pneumonia (an ENTIRELY plausible and common scenario, btw), and itself has at least mild anti-inflammatory properties.

There's also a solid basis for hypothesizing that something that helps only a little will do a lot more good if you start taking it BEFORE the illness blows up and becomes serious. Failure to work in someone who's dying doesn't mean it won't impair the infection enough to keep it from BECOMING life-threatening in the first place.

Would I take HCQ *and* Azithromycin purely for PrEP? Probably not, just due to the added cardiac risks inherent with the combination. Would I want to keep azithromycin on hand so I could immediately take my first dose at the first unambiguous C19 symptom? Absolutely. Once the first symptoms appear, you're in a literal race against the clock, and the whole risk equation changes... you have a limited window of time to beat back the infection and minimize its cellular damage, and the clock is ticking. If you wait for official confirmation with present tests, by the time you have hard confirmation, it's probably too late to put out the metaphorical fire with a tiny extinguisher.

As I mentioned earlier, the fact that pretty much every hospital worker in America who can get their hands on HCQ is now taking it speaks far more loudly about its potential value than people proclaiming that it shouldn't be taken because it's unproven. At this point, anyone with half a brain has figured out that the main motive behind the "don't take it!" mantra is concern for causing a shortage and hoarding, and not genuine belief that it's actually useless. It's a valid concern, but when you keep telling people one thing while acting upon a different agenda, eventually people figure out that you HAVE an agenda that doesn't necessarily align with their own personal best interests & automatically start to assume that the more forcefully you proclaim something is unimportant, the more important it probably is.

The same phenomenon was seen in the former Soviet Union. People would read in the paper that there was a bumper crop of something, and IMMEDIATELY run out to the store and stockpile as much of it as they could, because they knew it was probably going to vanish from store shelves and become unavailable for the next year because the article in the paper was a lie.

Incidentally, the second-best thing available right now to reduce your likelihood of having an otherwise-minor case of C19 turn into a life-threatening one is zinc picolinate... the form of zinc with the greatest bioavailability and potential for uptake into lung cells. The dose you want is 25-40mg/day. You can take 50mg/day, but should only do it for a week or two or you'll end up with a copper deficiency (excessive zinc displaces copper).

There's little to no evidence that having a zinc surplus is beneficial... but there's fairly solid evidence that a zinc DEFICIENCY makes lung tissue less-elastic & more vulnerable to injury & scarring from cytokine inflammation. Ergo, 25mg/day... not enough to be harmful if you're already getting plenty, but enough to satisfy your needs by a hefty margin if your diet, like the diets of most people, is deficient in some major way. After a month or two of 25mg/day, you can probably drop back to 10-15mg/day going forward. Note that all of this assumes you're taking zinc picolinate, or at least some chelated zinc ion... zinc oxide, the cheap version, is almost as useless and non-bioavailable as magnesium oxide. Zinc oxide is about as useful as eating gravel dust, because that's basically what it is.

If people are dying why not try everything? I can’t believe so many people hate Trump so much they would diss a potential treatment for this. No evidence that hydroxychloroquine makes anyone worse. But this Chinese study does not appear to include azithromycin -Z-pak. Which is what is being tried in New York.

[quote] Dear Trump voters, please put down the fish tank cleaner

It appears this was yet another hoax. The woman involved was a far left activist.

I want there to be a cure or vaccine, but I don't want this drug to be the cure because if so, Trump will take credit for it.

[quote] If people are dying why not try everything? I can’t believe so many people hate Trump so much they would diss a potential treatment for this. No evidence that hydroxychloroquine makes anyone worse.

Trump hate aside, it’s a terrible idea to prescribe a drug without first testing it in a randomized, controlled clinical trial. For all we know it COULD make things worse. They could find that more people die after taking it then compared to the standard of care.

[quote]it’s a terrible idea to prescribe a drug without first testing it in a randomized, controlled clinical trial

Every day doctors write prescriptions for off-label usage. It's not a terrible idea.

In the middle of a pandemic, r50, that is an insane attitude to take.

[quote] Every day doctors write prescriptions for off-label usage. It's not a terrible idea.

Off-label doesn’t mean untested. It just mean that there’s a strong body of evidence that supports its use which haS never been forth to the regulatory body in charge of labeling it for use. And yes, prescribing untested hydroxychloroquine for coronavirus is untested and a TERRIBLE IDEA.

Nobody is talking about Interferon Alpha, Remdesivir, Favipiravir, blood plasma, and Oseltamivir combinations with HIV drugs, all of which are currently being used or considered worldwide.

All America talks about is chloroquine because Trump mentioned it. The only reason why he mentioned chloroquine is because he was told about it by someone else. Even if chloroquine is the cure, Trump didn’t come up with it or invent it. Why are people so adamant about this one medication while ignoring a sea of promising medications that are currently being studied?

Thailand just used Oseltamivir combined with Lopanivir and Ritonavir on a COVID patient, and after 48 hours the virus was undetectable. Great news, but that doesn’t mean we found a cure just because something worked one one patient. Or even 5 patients.

That’s why clinical trials are conducted. You can’t have the result before the trial is completed, just because you hope that one particular mediation is the cure.

Because, r55, Cloroquine and zpacs are cheap therefore can be widely distributed. All the other medications you mention are far more expensive and therefore relatively prohibitive.

Aspirin is also widely available. That doesn’t mean it’s a cure for COVID.

It’s one thing to discuss different drugs that are being used to treat patients, but it’s a different thing to tout one as a cure when the clinical trial data is just not there. Let’s wait for the clinical trials to show what works and what doesn’t.

The smart way to go about it.

is this drug working?

The nice thing about giving a cheap, readily-available drug that's already known to be relatively safe to a million semi-random people during a pandemic is, you almost immediately get to have a million data points to analyze, and even more (from people who just weren't willing/able to take it) to compare them to.

It's basic data science. A million potentially skewed data points ALWAYS trump a hundred carefully controlled data points, because no study is EVER perfect, and when you start getting up into MILLIONS of data points, the noise starts to cancel itself out (or at least, become obvious AS noise).

OK, for those who want hard data... try this meta-analysis (which, I hope, has already occurred to someone at the CDC and was underway several days ago):

1. Get CVS and Walgreens to provide the CDC with the total number of 90-day prescriptions for hydroxychloroquine filled by their pharmacies (retail and mail order) in major metro areas like New York, Miami, New Orleans, and Los Angeles between October 1, 2019 and January 31, 2020. No need for names, though a breakdown by age & gender would be nice... and breakdown by additional conditions & other meds would be even better. Yeah, there are other pharmacies... but those two pharmacy chains alone account for something like 98% of the dispensed prescriptions in most metro areas. They're about as good of an easy cross-section proxy as you're going to get on short notice.

2. Divide the total number of prescriptions for each metro area by their respective populations to get the percentage of locals likely to have been taking HCQ long-term prior to the pandemic's emergence in the US.

3. Now, get hospitals to count the number of patients presenting with symptoms of C19, confirmed C19 (what few there are), and those who ended up in the ICU with more serious progression and their ultimate outcomes... and count the subset of each cohort that was known to have been taking HCQ at the time of presentation/admission. This is one of the questions they ask you ... "what medications are you already taking?"

4. Compare the numbers from #3 to the numbers from #2.

If patients taking HCQ long-term prior to C19 were statistically lower in number as a total percent of patients from #3... that's pretty damn compelling evidence. Not conclusive either way because there are still other factors, but it definitely would be one more chunk of evidence adding or refuting credibility.

THIS is the kind of unintentional indirect data that becomes useful when you have a data pool with thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even millions of endpoints to analyze using the same techniques advertisers use to determine how to manipulate consumers into buying one product instead of another.

r49, stop linking to right wing sites

r59, Cloroquine doesn't seem to work against c19 on its own, but does apparently shows promise when used in conjunction with antibiotics.

The study cited by OP is one done of the Cloroquine alone. Also, it was done in China, so must be take with a grain of salt in general.

It appears zinc is an essential component of the cocktail as well... possibly even moreso than the azithromycin, if you're concerned primarily about using it for PrEP.

Then why after getting it do so many people get better the next day?