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A controversial drug taken by Donald Trump to ward off the coronavirus may be safer than sceptics initially thought, research suggests. The president announced in May he had been taking the anti-malarial medication hydroxychloroquine for a week and a half, causing first-time prescription rates and online searches for the therapy to soar. Hydroxychloroquine is not approved for the prevention or treatment of COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, in the UK or US. The World Health Organization (WHO) stopped testing the drug after a Harvard study found patients on hydroxychloroquine were more likely to develop de-novo ventricular arrhythmia, the...

September 22, 2020 (American Thinker) — Dr. Anthony Fauci has been hailed in the press as the nation's top infectious disease expert.  He's been feted with presidential honors and high praise for his medical acumen.  His policy disagreements with President Trump, supposedly as the voice of "science," have made him a hero on the left.  Such laurels and the implied power conveyed have led to some weird side-effects — such as his image featured on ladies' underwear and declarations that he's the sexiest man alive. He's still being posterized on the left with calls to "Thank Dr. Fauci." But it's about time this idol topples,...

Once an obscure and highly technical term, it first entered common parlance when, in mid-March, President Trump suggested hydroxychloroquine as a possible treatment for COVID-19. Physicians and scientists said that randomized controlled trials involving the drug would be needed before we could know whether it was an effective treatment. More recently, media coverage of a possible coronavirus vaccine has often mentioned the term, noting that vaccines must go through such trials before the Food and Drug Administration will approve them. Indeed, it has become prominent in the news since the pandemic began. Typing the term into the search engine Google...

A commercially available nasal antiseptic solution "inactivates" COVID-19 just 15 seconds after the coronavirus is exposed to it, effectively preventing the infection from developing, according to a study published Thursday by JAMA Otolaryngology-Head & Neck Surgery. By inactivating the virus, the antiseptic nasal rinse -- a povidone-iodine solution administered in the nostril -- also would help prevent those infected from spreading it to others, the researchers said. The findings are based on lab experiments designed to assess how the rinse affects new coronavirus cells "in vitro," or in test tubes. Researchers have yet to study the rinse in humans with...

Health and Human Services Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs Michael Caputo recently warned on Facebook live that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) “was harboring a ‘resistance unit’ to Trump.” Caputo alleged that career scientists “haven’t gotten out of their sweatpants except for meetings at coffee shops” to plot “how they’re going to attack Donald Trump.”“There are scientists who work for this government who do not want America to get well, not until after Joe Biden is president,” Caputo added.While the media has tried to present Caputo as unhinged, could he actually be right? Is it actually possible...

The leading infectious-disease expert, Dr Anthony Fauci recommends that people take vitamin supplements, especially with the schools resuming operations between COVID-19 pandemic, and the flu season nearing. Key Highlights Dr Anthony Fauci, in an interview revealed that he consumes vitamin D and C supplements to reduce his susceptibility to infections He said he recommends that people should consume these supplements (Cut) For the uninitiated, Dr Fauci is the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in the USA. Speaking with actress Jennifer Garner in a social media live interview, Fauci mentioned that he himself takes vitamin C...

Published: August 25, 2020; DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ejim.2020.08.019 AbstractBackground Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) was proposed as potential treatment for COVID-19. Objective We set-up a multicenter Italian collaboration to investigate the relationship between HCQ therapy and COVID-19 in-hospital mortality. Methods In a retrospective observational study, 3,451 unselected patients hospitalized in 33 clinical centers in Italy, from February 19, 2020 to May 23, 2020, with laboratory-confirmed SARS-CoV-2 infection, were analyzed. The primary end-point in a time-to event analysis was in-hospital death, comparing patients who received HCQ with patients who did not. We used multivariable Cox proportional-hazards regression models with inverse probability for treatment weighting by propensity...

Death rates in countries that rely on hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) for the treatment of COVID-19 appear to be dramatically lower than death rates in countries that discourage the use of the drug.A new study claims that the death rate in the countries that used HCQ early on was 77 percent lower than in countries where the drug was not used (c19study.com).The startling thing about this finding—if accurate—is that the countries where HCQ has been extensively used are poor in relation to the countries that could afford to adopt the “lockdown” model. Those poorer countries cannot afford the massive amounts of money...

SUMMARY: Many countries either adopted or declined early treatment with HCQ, effectively forming a large trial with 1.8 billion people in the treatment group and 663 million in the control group. As of September 1, 2020, an average of 53.7 per million in the treatment group have died, and 459.3 per million in the control group, relative risk 0.117. After adjustments, treatment and control deaths become 111.8 per million and 678.7 per million, relative risk 0.16. The probability of an equal or lower relative risk occurring from random group assignments is 0.007. Accounting for predicted changes in spread, we...

The controversial French professor who vigorously defended the anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine to help beat the coronavirus has been targeted by an ethics complaint that could see him face sanctions or barred from practising, a medical association said Thursday. The Marseille-based Didier Raoult is accused in the complaint by medical peers of spreading false information about the benefits of hydroxychloroquine. US and Brazilian presidents Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro seized upon Raoult's promotion of hydroxychloroquine and have trumpeted its benefits since the pandemic erupted. But the method and conclusions of Raoult's studies were challenged from the start by critics and other...

Successfully dealing with COVID-19 comes down to competently dealing with two different aspects of the disease: Prevention and Treatment. Let’s break each down in simplified terms.First, we need to be very clear that statistics related to COVID-19 continue to be amazingly porous (missing, unreliable, inaccurate, etc.). As such any estimates for success have a wide range of accuracy. To simplify these estimates, I’ve broken them down to approximate quartiles. Second, we need to understand that there are other prevention and treatment options being explored (e.g. here and here), but the publicly available evidence to date does not appear to bring...

Preprint. August 23, 2020. Key Words: hydroxychloroquine, COVID-19, SARS-CoV-2, Wuhan Abstract Three population surveys were performed, seeking information about the drugs prescribed for COVID-19 patients. The August 16 national survey (USA-0816, 868 valid responses) and the August 3 national survey (USA-0803, 1,059 valid responses) covered the entire US. Another smaller survey (TX-0711, 116 valid responses) covered the state of Texas. All responses to all three surveys are attached in anonymized form for further analysis by the scientific community as one of the deliverables. The analysis was focused on Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ). This study has found that Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) was used for...

Dear Editor, I enjoyed your article a couple of weeks back. I have told myself repeatedly I probably need to let go of this. Something-for good or ill - just won’t let me. I was an engineering scientist in the space program for 20 years and successfully contributed to breeding a strain of varroa resistant honeybees (verified by FDA) for about 20. I began investigating hydroxychloroquine in early April. After I had heard mention of it I began researching it using Google Translate to translate a study by the famed virologist Didier Raoult. To make a long story shorter, when...

Much has been written about the effectiveness of hydroxychloroquine, for example here.  We now have indications that recent restrictions on it caused the second wave of COVID-19 in the United States. On 15 June 2020, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) revoked emergency authorization for hydroxychloroquine to treat COVID-19 patients.  Dr. Harvey Risch, epidemiologist, recently pointed out that this caused people who were not hospital patients to be denied access to this drug.  Sure enough, 15 June was the start of the second wave of COVID-19 cases.  The second wave had twice the first wave's high for peak cases at 60,000 per day.  Better...

As an epidemiologist, I believe that America has been profoundly ill-served by the contribution of its public health authorities to the debate on the efficacy of treating vulnerable COVID-19 patients with hydroxychloroquine (HCQ). It is a debate with a direct link to whether America’s schools should reopen next month. Even those who reject the World Health Organization’s misleading comparison of COVID-19 with the horrendous 1918 Spanish flu pandemic and its presumption that humans lack any immunity against SARS-CoV-2 would welcome improvements in our ability to treat patients with COVID-19, in order to reduce the risk in reopening schools. Distinguished Yale...

As an epidemiologist, I believe that America has been profoundly ill-served by the contribution of its public health authorities to the debate on the efficacy of treating vulnerable COVID-19 patients with hydroxychloroquine (HCQ). It is a debate with a direct link to whether America’s schools should reopen next month. Even those who reject the World Health Organization’s misleading comparison of COVID-19 with the horrendous 1918 Spanish flu pandemic and its presumption that humans lack any immunity against SARS-CoV-2 would welcome improvements in our ability to treat patients with COVID-19, in order to reduce the risk in reopening schools. Distinguished Yale...

I got to asking Dr. Google what happened to the group 'America's Front Line Doctors'. This from their website: "American life has fallen casualty to a massive disinformation campaign. We can speculate on how this has happened, and why it has continued, but the purpose of the inaugural White Coat Summit is to empower Americans to stop living in fear."

The Frontline Doctors and Hydroxychloroquine Disinformation

Andrew Wilcow, a host on Sirius XM's “Patriot” channel, routinely makes a perceptive observation about the conflict between President Donald Trump and the Democratic Party. Trump could cure cancer, Wilcow said, and the Democrats would defend the rights of tumors. Wilkow's observation is not so absurd when applied to the Covid-19 pandemic. A coalition of "progressives," the Democratic Party, government bureaucrats and media refuses to promote or make an effective, inexpensive treatment available. Why? So they can politically exploit the pandemic for as long as possible and get the Presidential ticket of former Vice President Joe Biden and California...

Background Tests of Hydroxychloroquine used huge doses. But when the dose was set back to normal it worked great. The tests were fraud. Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) has been largely used and investigated as therapy of COVID-19 , at total dose usually ranging from 2400 mg to 9600 mg. In Belgium, off-label use of low-dose HCQ (2400 mg in total over five days) was recommended for hospitalized patients with COVID-19. “low-dose” regimen of HCQ sulphate in monotherapy