Funny. I made a post that included a link to the 2005 PubMed paper in early 2020, before Trump had even mentioned hydrochlorquine as being an option. No one replied to that post so I don’t know if anyone bothered to read the paper.
Anyway when Trump did mention HCQ I figured that his people had done the same thing that I had, which was to plug “SARS” into the NIH search engine and see what popped up. There weren’t many studies at the time but that was one of them.
The study is actually about CQ rather than HCQ, HCQ being a less harsh version of the same drug. The 2005 researchers had applied CQ to Green Monkey Kidney tissue that had been infected with SARS. They got excellent results. CQ worked great on the infected Vero 81 cells in the lab.
The problem is what works on monkey tissue in vitro doesn’t always transfer to humans, in vivo. And it wasn’t until SARS-2 showed up that CQ/HCQ could be tried on live humans.
It was tried many times, results were posted at PubMed for anyone to read. In one attempt Vietnam gave HCQ to all of their nurses in the hope that it would protect them from infection. The nurses contracted Covid at the same rate that they did when they hadn’t been taking HCQ. Apparently that was the typical experience. What worked in the lab didn’t work in the real world.
