The only way to determine the safety and effectiveness of Hydroxychloroquine for the new coronavirus is through controlled tests.
It is now being used in hospitals with other drugs to save lives, and that will certainly continue. Your doctor is, right now, completely free to prescribe it to you, but it’s unlikely that he will do so until the safe dosage is determined.
For a preventative use, there have been no clinical studies at all, and that puts it a year away at least.
That is a misrepresentation of how FDA approved medications are applied to new illnesses. If your belief were true then it would also apply to the other drug in the combination - azithromycin. But do you really believe anybody thinks we should suspend dosing people that have ARDS with antibiotics because the cause of the respiratory distress is a new virus?
If you fully applied your logic, then we would need a double blind placebo study to determine if washing your hands, or wearing a mask, was safe and effective against COVID-19. After all, in the world of worrying about whether or not existing, proven medicines should be used you might also want to run a test to prove that hand washing with certain soaps didn't accidentally cause some greater risk.
Obviously we don't do that. Instead we apply scientific knowledge and testing. The widely published research from France used a direct, objective measure of viral load to show that the hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin combination worked to clear the virus from the patient and return them to health.
There is no harm to gathering more data, but controlled tests that include a placebo component in an epidemic are not appropriate when a treatment is known that has been shown to be effective and safe in even a limited clinical trial. Equivalent data can be gleaned by comparison of data from randomly selected patients treated with various drug combinations as compared to patients that had the illness before the treatments were developed.
Not thinking this prediction is accurate.
The antimalarial drugs are being used now. In China, Israel, Australia, France and in NYC at the very least.
Lenox Hill has a 100 patients so far treated w/antimalarias. The doctor from Lenox Hill said that his colleagues at other NYC hospitals were all using this drug or a combo containing itas well. The first million doses are earmarked by FEMA to be sent to NY shortly per POTUS.