A Small Trial Finds That Hydroxychloroquine Is Not Effective For Treating Coronavirus

American Council on Science and Health ^ | 04/06/20 | Katherine Seley-Radtke

[Pining_4_TX]

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.

[HANG THE EXPENSE]

If the muzzis havent burnt it to the ground.They are hell on cars over there.

[HANG THE EXPENSE]

Wheres her sidekick, the jackass?

[TChad]

From the study:

In summary, despite a reported antiviral activity of chloroquine against COVID-19 in vitro, we found no evidence of a strong antiviral activity or clinical benefit of the combination of hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin for the treatment of our hospitalized patients with severe COVID-19.

So, a very small trial, and the HCQ-AZ was only used on patients with advanced COVID-19 infections. If you are looking for treatment failures, that's how you find them.

No mention is made of Dr. Raoult's larger second study, or his much larger third study. All we have of the third study so far is the abstract. The full third study should definitively answer the virus clearance question.

[HANG THE EXPENSE]

Corrct

[HANG THE EXPENSE]

Correct

[HANG THE EXPENSE]

YEP

[Osage Orange]

This name....Katherine Seley-Radtke..rings a bell.

[WellyP]

Hydroxychloroquine is the KEY that allows Zinc (Z-Pac) to enter the infected cell and prevent the virus from replicating. The antibiotic azithromycin is to take care of opportunistic secondary infections.

[WellyP]

Many of the worse infection have occurred in patients who are Zinc deficient.

[aMorePerfectUnion]

Amounts were high compared to Dr. Zelenko’s protocol.

[rwoodward]

It’s called devolution. The older society gets, the more we move towards the chimp on horseback scenario!

[Pining_4_TX]

Nope. They tend to be quite conservative, always debunking the latest scare story from the enviro whackos.

Man, after the replies I got from posting this, I need to buy some asbestos undies. :-) I just thought it was interesting. I didn’t know it would rile people up so much.

[Dogbert41]

"And when they say a “small” study, they mean 11 people. From the actual medial study... “There were 7 men and 4 women with a mean age of 58.7 years (range: 20-77), 8 had significant comorbidities associated with poor outcomes (obesity: 2; solid cancer: 3; hematological cancer: 2; HIV-infection: 1).”"

Well damn, son! I can see why we need to put the breaks on this medication STAT! (S)

I'm shocked they didn't do the study in Dachau before they went into the showers.

[rolling_stone]

...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...

everyone claims this but not one person has stated they can’t get the drug because of a shortage..BS

[rlmorel]

OMG...that’s hilarious!!!

Sigh. Isn’t it the oddest things you do as a young person with siblings? You look at them now, and shake your head. But something like that, you keep your whole life...:)

[rlmorel]

I really resisted that mind set. But it seems like every article I read that has that tone, well. It has turned into a kind of parlor game for me on Free Republic.

When I see a thread with that subject, I enter in without reading the source. I read the article, without looking at the source, and less than a paragraph in look up at the source. NYT, Washington Post. Time. Etc.

Could be coincidence...

[WASCWatch]

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.

How stupid does she the people are. Of course hydroxychloroquine with Z-pac and Zinc con't help the immune system clear coronavirus. The combination of the drugs do that.

[Hostage]

> "This site is not a liberal lefty site ...."

The 'summarizer' (I am being polite) is liberal and comes from one of the most liberal backgrounds in the United States.

The liberal chemist from Univ MD, Baltimore County wrote this summary saying right off the bat in paragraph 2, "a study just published in a French medical journal ..."

This is misleading and it is not a trivial point:

Here is the date found in the linked French study:

Received Date: 28 March 2020

https://reader.elsevier.com/reader/sd/pii/S0399077X20300858?token=DB6EE3AFBB2086304664FBAD863C9EC7DB78E6E575810269F73ACA676457DB83B940AE7ACB61D88F2BD965A61446A42B

The study was conducted starting sometime in late February and wrapped up a little after mid-March more than two weeks before the 6 April 2020 when the liberal chemist published her summary. Since then, it has been superseded by dozens of other reports.

Now before saying my comment regarding the misleading timeline is petty, I will say in normal times a study that was submitted for preprint on March 28 is indeed a study "just published". In normal times however, this 'study' would never be approved the way it was conducted.'But in a distressful emergency time, there are results coming in every day, so a study published weeks ago is already stale especially a study as flawed as this one.

So let's look at some meaty detail.

To save time for those who haven't time to read this commentary, the punch line is this study references garbage. This is truly garbage. I have reviewed hundreds, been involved in dozens upon dozens of clinical trials, designed and reviewed clinical trial designs over many years in my younger career. So I say all this with a professional eye.

I'll give an example that many Freepers can understand. A base commander gets a phone call that General Savage will be visiting his base tomorrow. The grounds of the base have been neglected, The lawns have not been cared for, not watered or cut, they are brown and dry. The base commander gives an order to his assistant to get the grass green no matter what it takes. The assistant relays the order to lower ranking staff who huddle and decide to do an emergency drive to an off-base home improvement store where they buy all the green pain on the shelves and in stock plus a half dozen paint sprayers. They return to the base and have a group spray the lawns green (this actually happened in real life). The General arrives, goes through the formal salutes, looks around and tells the base commander "Well Done!"

The French study this chemist calls a trial was not a 'trial'. It was so small that it would never be taken with interest unless it was 'clean' and even then serious scientists would recommend to expand and intensely investigate details of mode of success or failure.

I'll explain what is meant by 'clean'. It was sloppy. It was as far as it could be from being representative. It's analogous to a ridiculous example of conducting a small 'study' on 11 severely addicted nearly dead heroin users trying to get them free of their acid reflux disease by having them drink 2 liters of buttermilk every day for a week. And then when the sick addicts kick th ebucket, the study investigator writes the buttermilk was ineffective in curing the acid reflux.

Now why in the world would this ever even be done? I am sorry to report, $$$. It would never be approved for $$$ if there wasn't an emergency. And $$$ is driving studies here in the US without Zinc. Who controls the $$$ here? Fauci. And who reviews, approves, instructs treatment protocols and trial design study arms? Who defines the STUDY ARMS?

What is a study 'arm'? We take patients and assign them to a study arm. For example, there will be a study arm for say ARM-1: a non-treatment standard of care, another ARM-2: Hyrdoxychloroquine plus Azithromycin. Then we analyse using statistical tests to see if there is a treatment effect between ARM-1 and ARM-2.

But where is the study arm for Zinc, ARM-3: Hyrdoxychloroquine plus Azithromycin plus Zinc?

How much would it cost to include ARM-3? Negligible, hardly anything, Zinc is cheap. But I suspect it would not stop Fauci and his minions from declaring ARM-3 unnecessary and that it should be omitted in the interest of cost effectiveness and with no supporting data for including it, even though there are many hundreds if not thousands of patients that have undergone Hydroxychloroquine with Zinc therapy with huge success rates. It's so easy to fool and snow non-clinicians like politicians and bureaucrats with clinical study lingo using these types of arguments.

The Hydroxychloroquine trials here are being set up for failure.

Now back to this small garbage study if it can be called a study.

I don't say these things with bias. If this was a well-run study with really good contrarian explanations, I would give it appropriate weight. But this 'study', this 'joke' of a study is put together by people that try to make it look like a pro study, they are worker bees, they are doing what they're told, they got the 'lingo' down but they're not fooling people like me but they can fool the General inspecting the base with the lawns spray painted green.

I posted about this study last week on a different thread, Here are the relevant paragraphs. Read them though and see if you can spot the flaws.

From the preprint study linked above:

Such a rapid and full viral clearance was quite unexpected and we wished to assess in a prospective study virologic and clinical outcomes of 11 consecutive patients hospitalized in our department who received hydroxychloroquine (600 mg/d for 10 days) and azithromycin (500 mg Day 1 and 250 mg days 2 to 5) using the same dosing regimen reported by Gautret et al. (3). There were 7 men and 4 women with a mean age of 58.7 years (range: 20-77), 8 had significant comorbidities associated with poor outcomes (obesity: 2; solid cancer: 3; hematological cancer: 2; HIV-infection: 1).

At the time of treatment initiation, 10/11 had fever and received nasal oxygen therapy. Within 5 days, one patient died, two were transferred to the ICU. In one patient, hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin were discontinued after 4 days because of a prolongation of the QT interval from 405 ms before treatment to 460 and 470 ms under the combination. Mean through blood concentration of hydroxychloroquine was 678 ng/mL (range: 381-891) at days 3-7 after treatment initiation.

Repeated nasopharyngeal swabs in 10 patients (not done in the patient who died) using a qualitative PCR assay (nucleic acid extraction using Nuclisens Easy Mag®, Biomerieux and amplification with RealStar SARS CoV-2®, Altona), were still positive for SARS-CoV2 RNA in 8/10 patients (80%, 95% confidence interval: 49-94) at days 5 to 6 after treatment initiation.

These virologic results stand in contrast with those reported by Gautret et al. and cast doubts about the strong antiviral efficacy of this combination. Furthermore, in their report Gautret et al also reported one death and three transfers to the ICU among the 26 patients who received hydroxychloroquine, also underlining the poor clinical outcome with this combination.

[Lurkina.n.Learnin]

We lived over an hour away from Dr Lee who had prescribed it and mom called him and he told her to bring him back in. When he saw the welts he asked mom what happened there. She stayed his brothers found it amusing. He just laughed.

[ldish]

did they use it with zinc and the z-pak like cocktail or just a haft ass like test to be sure it did not work - work! These asswipes been dragging their feet so long that even if it doesn’t work at all I’m damn certain it does just because of their actions - bureaucrats and dems!