Replies

The dismally poor state of science with respect to Covid-19 is rivaled only by that the state of science with respect to climate and, perhaps, psychology.

Good clinical trials take time and lots of money. They were never meant to be used in real time to fight disease. I agree that's frustrating when the news is reporting so many deaths due to this disease.

An example of this (if you look at the references that accompany Dr. McCullough's paper) was a study to look at HCQ was terminated due to poor recruitment (reference #6 Clinical Trials link to NCT04358068).

The best US study reported to date that found a benefit is Dr. McCullough's reference #23 this study Arshad et el Henry Ford HCQ study.

But in this study still 13.5% died from COVID-19 who received HCQ alone; compared to 18.1% HCQ + azithromycin and 26.4% with standard care. This may seem promising until you read the editorial comment that indicates the pool of standard care patients was much smaller than the treatment groups and likely represented a proportion of patients who were either sicker or had more chronic illnesses that put them at risk or were DNR status etc. The editorial about the issues with the study can be found here: Editorial discussing strengths and weakness of Henry Ford study

The post exposure prophylaxis studies have been disappointing as well: Post exposure trial of HCQ.

In this trial you have about a 14% chance of coming down with COVID-19 when exposed to a household member or are a healthcare work exposed without protection. There was no statistical difference found between those who received HCQ post exposure and those who did not.

Now you could say that zinc wasn't used in these trials. But Dr. McCullough's algorithm does not use zinc either. The point of this is that HCQ is a weak therapy at best and does nothing but expose you to its side effects at worst.

While I would agree there is a component of prejudice against the use of repurposed drugs. If HCQ were the antiviral proponents believe it to be, we would have seen better numbers across all trials.

As an example of how clinical trials are slow to evolve and be published. The Ivermectin study done at Broward Health between April and May 2020. Did not get published online until Oct 13, 2020 and then made the print Journal Chest in Jan 2021. Broward Health Ivermectin Study.

This found a 13.3% mortality for ivermectin vs 24.5% mortality in controls on multivariate analysis (15.0 vs 25.2% on single variate analysis) . This however was a small study with 173 patients treated with ivermectin vs 107 without.

We are still waiting for higher powered trials on ivermectin. Yes I know there are some South American studies but I prefer US based studies. As for Ivermectin availability the ED doctor was more than happy to provide me with a prescription for Ivermectin when I came down with COVID-19 in February. I ended up getting the Eli Lily monoclonal antibody treatment which a couple of weeks later was deemed ineffective and changed to a dual monoclonal antibody treatment. So even the big drug companies are up against the same clinical trial issues as HCQ and Ivermectin.