Free Republic

Could the old generic malaria drug hydroxychloroquine (Plaquenil, Sanofi-Aventis, among others), which is also used for the treatment of rheumatic disease, be an essential treatment for COVID-19? This hypothesis, put forward by some, including Professor Didier Raoult of the IHU Méditerranée Infection in Marseille, was dismissed by other eminent infectious disease specialists and dismissed as fake news recently by the Ministry of Health. Yet it resurfaced yesterday with the presentation on YouTube by Prof Raoult of positive results in a non-randomised, unblinded trial of 24 patients. This follows encouraging in vitro results obtained by a Chinese team led by Xueting...

Mind you, this is a guy who beat Hannity — a show that airs in primetime — in both total viewers and the demo last Friday at 5 p.m. Every last one of these advertisers is simply biding their time, wondering how long they have to wait until nutroots wrath is appeased and they can start advertising on Beck’s show again. I give it six months. Less if Greta gets dumped and GB ends up moved to 10 p.m. Twenty companies have pulled their ads from Beck’s show in just the last two weeks. The moves come after the Fox...

WASHINGTON — Federal health advisers recommended Tuesday that the government approve the first bird flu vaccine as a stopgap measure, despite evidence it wouldn't protect most people. In separate votes, the outside panel said the vaccine was both safe and effective. A vaccine must meet both standards to win FDA approval. The votes came after Food and Drug Administration officials said the Sanofi Aventis SA vaccine still could play an important role in protecting against the increased likelihood of a pandemic, despite its limited effectiveness. "I am of the view that anything is better than nothing," said panel member Dr....

With a tendency to stare zombie-like and run into stationary objects, a new species of impaired motorist is hitting the roads: the Ambien driver. Ambien, the nation's best-selling prescription sleeping pill, is showing up with regularity as a factor in traffic arrests, sometimes involving drivers who later say they were sleep-driving and have no memory of taking the wheel after taking the drug. In some state toxicology laboratories Ambien makes the top 10 list of drugs found in impaired drivers. Wisconsin officials identified Ambien in the bloodstreams of 187 arrested drivers from 1999 to 2004. And as a more people...

TUESDAY, Feb. 14 (HealthDay News) -- Men and women who stayed on the experimental weight-loss drug rimonabant for two years managed to lose weight and keep it off, a new study finds. And as an added bonus, those using rimonabant also showed improved blood levels of cholesterol and triglycerides, the researchers report. Rimonabant, which will likely be marketed by drug maker Sanofi-Aventis as Accomplia, is currently under review by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. If approved, it would become the third drug approved for weight loss, after orlistat (Xenical) and sibutramine (Meridia). "These are the longest results to date,"...

Posted on Tue, Aug. 31, 2004 Optimism on antiobesity drug Sanofi-Aventis said it was confident that Acomplia would be approved quickly by the FDA. By Ben Hirschler Reuters MUNICH, Germany - Sanofi-Aventis is confident that U.S. health-care officials will look favorably on its new antiobesity drug Acomplia and that the drug could win fast-track approval from the Food and Drug Administration. "The climate is more and more favorable," Michel Joly, the drugmaker's vice president of strategic marketing, said in an interview at the annual meeting of the European Society of Cardiology in Munich, where encouraging clinical data on the drug...