Replies

I know the Gateway Pundit site isn't thought of well here so I wanted to see its sources. That took some effort, but was well worth it!

His main source was in Italian and had 2 embedded links to interesting other medical articles embedded. I wish I could read Italian. Google translate seemed to work reasonably well, but the bulk of the article which appears to offer major insights to how Covid kills was fairly technical and I probably lost something in translation. Its short final paragraph briefly mentions that the Italian rheumatologic society surveyed 1200 of its members as to how their patients on chronic HCQ had been affected by Covid. Collectively they had 65,000 patients on it. They only could identify 20 patients who got Covid with zero deaths and zero needing ICU. GP, not the Italian article, commented that was 90% fewer cases than expected for Italy. An impressive 'observation.' If there is more detail behind that observation it's not linked.

One of embedded links lead to a 4/25 article of of S. Korea in International Journal of Antimicrobial Agents "Can post-exposure prophylaxis for COVID-19 be considered as an outbreak response strategy in long-term care hospitals?" Answer strongly appears to be yes! During the S. Korean Covid surge two infected people entered a long term care facility and were soon documented to have exposed essentially everyone. Anticipating disaster they tried to prevent it with HCQ as post-exposure prophylaxis. They put 190+ residents and 20+ staff on HCQ 400mg/d for up to 2 weeks. All had negative PCR tests at baseline. Two previously terminal patients died of old age, side effects and drop outs were trivial, and after two weeks NONE of the 211 treated patients had gotten the virus. Events took place before Trump mentioned HCQ, everyone had pre and post PCR tests and the study was done in the country the media likes to say handled the virus the best. There was no control group as all exposed were treated. But it's hard to argue with a sizable shutout!

Most interesting and the bulk of the piece was not about HCQ but rather about how Covid interacts with blood. Thanks to reading a translation I not certain how much of that was now established fact and how much was educated speculation. It seems to say the virus includes proteins which specifically attack and damage β-hemoglobin chains so hemoglobin loses iron and oxygen binding capacity. Infants aren't much affected because they mostly have alternative hemoglobins. People with β-thalassemia, a common genetic hemoglobin abnormality in Italy don't seem to be severely affected by Covid. The other embedded link was to a report summarizing 11 Covid infected β-thalassemia patients in northern Italy. Most were pretty ill before Covid, but none showed signs of respiratory failure or cytokine storm. Non-standard hemoglobin was protective. If I'm reading the translation correctly it says HCQ binds to ferriprotoporphyrin within the β-hemoglobin chains and prevents the viral proteins from binding there and doing damage. It's another proposed HCQ mechanism and one independent of zinc. In this case one that neither directly inhibits viral replication nor that is directly anti-inflammatory. If there are any lurking Freeper Docs who read Italian, ideally hematologists, I'd be fascinated by their take on the original.

Overall this offers two strong, different studies supporting early, even preventative therapy with HCQ. Many of the Italian Lupus and RA patients would have been taking the dosage S. Korea used. They show you could stay on that dose a long time. Further dosing studies should be done. If lower doses would work it would be even safer, better tolerated and cheaper.