Gomer Pyle, Ace Reporter
Posted on 04/13/2020 7:01:35 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
At Christ Hospital in Jersey City, patients hospitalized with coronavirus receive a battery of treatments that doctors hope will ease their suffering and save their lives. They are given oxygen. Steroid inhalers. High doses of vitamin C, thiamine and zinc. Even plain old aspirin, to name a few.
Also provided to patients is hydroxychloroquine, a decades-old malaria drug thrust into the spotlight of the coronavirus pandemic by President Donald Trump. It unexpectedly joined the culture wars last month after Trump touted it as a potential “game changer,” though medicine has yet to determine whether it is effective in combating the disease.
While the drug has shown promise in treating COVID-19 in some small studies, its value remains unproven and it has not undergone clinical trials that test its safety and efficacy, as the nation’s top infectious disease expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, has noted. But with no known treatment for coronavirus and hundreds of new deaths in New Jersey reported every day, doctors are still turning to hydroxychloroquine, hoping that its so-far optimistic results prove true.
“Right now, this is the best that we’ve got,” said Dr. Naresh Patel, a hospitalist at Christ Hospital, one of three Hudson County hospitals run by CarePoint Health. Patel said that virtually 100 percent of suspected COVID-19 cases admitted to his hospital are receiving hydroxychloroquine as part of their daily treatment regimen, though he said it remains unclear whether it is helping.
“The patients getting better, I don’t know whether I can tell you it’s the drug or the oxygen” or other treatments, said Patel, who has been working nearly non-stop amid the crisis. “I wish I had a definitive answer for you, but it is hard to tell.”
Still, Patel said, the unprecedented emergency requires doctors to try every avenue they can.
“You want to do what you can do,” Patel said.
Hydroxychloroquine has long been used to treat malaria, lupus and rheumatoid arthritis, but the Food and Drug Administration has permitted its emergency use for coronavirus. The hope comes amid limited studies -- one in France and one in China -- that suggest the drug may help reduce the disease’s effects and speed along recovery.
Doctors in New Jersey can also prescribe the drug off-label to COVID-19 sufferers who are not hospitalized, though the state requires them to have tested positive for the disease, and not merely show its symptoms.
That rule was enacted in late March by the state Division of Consumer Affairs amid reports the drug was being hoarded by people who did not need it, including by doctors and dentists writing prescriptions for themselves and family members. But the mandate has been criticized by some in the medical community, who note it can take days for tests results to come back, even as their patients gets sicker.
On Thursday, the division relaxed those restrictions for nursing homes and other assisted-living facilities, which have been particularly hard-hit by the outbreak. Patients there can now be prescribed the drug even before a positive test is returned.
Like most drugs, hydroxychloroquine has side effects that can be dangerous, particularly for patients with heart conditions that the drug could trigger. Some doctors warn that while the drug’s benefits are unknown, those risks are real.
Dr. Vincent Silenzio of Rutgers University’s School of Public Health said he doesn’t second-guess doctors on the front lines who are administering the drug, given the desperate times. But the science is just not there, he said.
“I’ll happily eat crow later on, but until then, the facts are the facts,” Silenzio said. “There is no proof, just yet.”
At Virtua Health’s five hospitals in South Jersey, about 20 to 50% of hospitalized coronavirus patients are receiving the drug, estimated Dr. Martin Topiel, the chain’s infectious disease prevention officer. The hospitals screen out those with higher risk of side effects, and have had no instances of adverse reactions, he said.
“We use it, not for every patient,” Topiel said.
Like Patel, Topiel said doctors see the drug as worthwhile, considering its potential medical benefit. But also like Patel, Topiel said it is unclear whether hydroxychloroquine is performing as hoped.
“I can’t say right now one way or the other that we can make a judgment about it from what we’ve seen,” Topiel said. “This is really where blinded, placebo-ed studies really help us understand the benefits of medications.”
Rutgers Cancer Institute of New Jersey is conducting one of many clinical trials across the country of the drug. The effort is being fast-tracked, and the goal is to have results by early June, said Dr. Steven Libutti, the institute’s director who is overseeing the trial.
The study will test the effectiveness of hydroxychloroquine alone or when paired with the drug azithromycin, which is used to treat infections. The trial will involve 160 COVID-19 patients, with a control group that does not receive either drug.
Each patient’s virus levels will be tested over a six-day period to determine whether hydroxychloroquine or the combination of drugs is having an impact, Libutti said. Volunteers are being signed up at University Hospital in Newark and Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital in New Brunswick.
Libutti said he knows that hospitals across New Jersey and other states are already turning to hydroxychloroquine in the fight against coronavirus. The study will help answer whether that is effective, he said.
“That’s a strong motivation for us to try to get where we hope to be as quickly as we can,” Libutti said.
...though its Coronavirus success isn’t proven.
Would you want to be in the “control group” in a test to see if HCQ saves lives? I wouldn’t.
Dr. Doom hasn’t studied the virus for 40 years so he can’t say it works
Dr. Doom is a bureaucrat’s bureaucrat
Gomer Pyle, Ace Reporter
We can invite Gretchen Whitmer, Gavin Newsom, Alyssa Milano, Steve Sisolak and the entire DNC to be the control group.
See how quick they step up.
The patients and doc in a blind trial do not know who is getting the drug and who is control. A trial administrator does and is constantly reviewing the data. If the group with the drug is doing much better than the control group the study be “unblinded” and the control group given the drug. It is considered unethical to let people suffer (die) just to get to the study endpoint.
...though no test has been done to prove it.
Double blinded, placebo controlled statistically robust studies
are difficult to do in a crisis situation,
sometimes one just has to shoot from the hip
It’s not proven, it just works. Unlike a vaccine which may be proven and approved, but will not work for someone who is dying from the disease. A vaccine is usually a anagram of a disease that will trigger the body to fight the fake infection and create viable anti bodies. If you inject a vaccine into someone with the disease you will only increase the load on the immune system. It will help kill them.
But the money is so important to some people they do not explain this, and hope to preserve the monetary potential of the widest customer base possible. So what if you die, they got the 50 bucks.
So they keep pounding this informative misinformation drum to discredit a cure to sell a preventative palliative.
Tell Ace that benefit of lock downs haven’t been “proven” either. And their side effects could be fatal. Maybe we should do a multi-year control study on a large population to find out.
“though its Coronavirus success isn’t proven”
MSM desperately clinging to the hope it will fail. Really something when you think about it.
...though its Coronavirus success isn’t proven
Partisan Media Shills update.
The reason doctors won’t endorse it for this particular indication is they know that if a patient dies, his family will sue them out of their pants because they used non-FDA approved protocol, waivers signed or not... No one can stop the family of a diseased to file a malpractice lawsuit against that doctor. We, keyboard warriors, can rant all we want, all day long about it, but that’s the reality.
“...its value remains unproven and it has not undergone clinical trials that test its safety and efficacy..”
Shove your clinical trials ...there’s a huge one underway as we speak. How has it worked for the last month or are you even checking?
If that number is less than 2%, then screw the "double-blind" nonsense and start dishing out the meds!!!
RE: Among the 20 largest “anecdotal” tests of the HCQ/Z-pack combo, what percentage of patients have died and what was their health state at the time the meds were started?
WHAT WAS THEIR STATE OF HEALTH AT THE TIME THE MEDS STARTED? <—— that is the crucial question.
If you are going to do a comparative study and administer HCQ only to the sickest patients ( i.e. those already intubated ) and then some placebo or other antivirals on less severe patients, the results will of course be skewed.
Every non-randomized trials or real life treatment done by say. Dr. Raoult of France and Dr. Zelenlo of upstate NY tells us that HCQ is MOST EFFECTIVE when treated EARLY, i.s., before the patient is intubated.
In fact, HCQ is almost always successful in patients who are Covid-19 positive and start to display symptoms. If you administer the drug combo early, the symptoms disappear and the patients recover within 5 to 6 days.
This is a tremendous relief on hospitals and healthcare workers.
It may be true that 'medicine' hasn't proven beyond the shadow of a doubt (requiring a two year "double-blind" study) that it is effective. However, to anyone anywhere beyond those whose heads are mired deep in the DC Swamp it certainly is the only mass produced treatment that has been demonstrated to be effective in preventing numerous COVIS-19 virus deaths, with zero serious side effects. For that, Fake News, such as this statement, must be thoroughly denounced.
Just show me the success rate.
We have already 70 years of data on the safety of the drug.
If we see that it is 98% effective and 99% safe, why would we withhold it?
No mention of Zinc, and I wonder why. I had read that it has to be a HCQ-Zinc combo, since what the HCQ does is open up ion channels in the cell so the Zinc can get into the cell and kill the virus dead.
If the person starts out with normal level of zinc, the HCQ will still work “fairly” well with whatever Zinc is there. It only takes a little. But the body does not store zinc and therefore does not build up zinc reserves. That’s why every one of these patients should have been getting daily supplementary zinc along with the HCQ.
Or so I have read.
I am not a molecular biologist, nor do I play one on FR.
It’s only proven on the people it’s been used on.
I’m most interested in the prophylactic abilities of HCQ. I would imagine most of the doctors and first responders are taking it as a precaution in the hard hit areas just in case it works. It will be interesting to see if it does indeed keep the virus away.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.