As we reported here last March 13:
J. Gao, Z. Tian & X. Yang from Quingdao, China said that clinical trials of chloroquine were conducted in ten hospitals, and that “results from more than 100 patients have demonstrated that chloroquine phosphate is superior to the control treatment in inhibiting the exacerbation of pneumonia, improving lung imaging findings, promoting a virus- negative conversion, and shortening the disease course”.
Subsequently,
the Chinese choloroquine treatment protocol was adopted in South Korea, where the epidemic was controlled with less than 1% fatality rate.
Didier Raoult is one of the most prestigious and prolific infectious disease specialists in the Western world. He promptly accepted the Chinese and South Korean results, and started treating patients with hydroxychloroquine, combined with azithromycin. He published two preliminary studies, including
a recent one following 80 patients, showing outstanding results.
A running tally of patients treated with the Raoult protocol is maintained by IHU Mediterranee Infection Institute and AP-HM hospitals. As of this writing they have treated 1,524 patients, with only one fatality so far.
Dr. Vladimir Zelenko says that as of March 27, he has treated 669 covid-19 patients in his New York practice using a similar protocol, and out of those, there have been zero deaths, zero intubations, and two hospitalizations.
Dr. Raoult argues that with evidence as good as this, doing clinical trials that involve withholding treatment from a control population, is like doing experiments comparing the survival rate of skydivers with or without parachutes. It's no longer ethical to run double blinded, controlled studies.
However, a key part of the protocol is to treat as early as possible. If no treatment is given before the patient is hospitalized and on a ventilator, it might be too late.
So you would think that the US would be right on this. After all, even Trump himself is bullish on chloroquine.
But....
In the US, the
Dept. of Health and Human Services accepted a donation of 30 million doses of hydroxychloroquine from Sandoz. The pills are being reserved for patients who are already hospitalized! With the increasingly desperate situation in cities like New York and New Orleans, hospital beds are in short supply, and those few patients able to get one of those beds are all critically ill and unlikely to benefit from the treatment.
While HHS is hoarding their millions of pills, doctors like Zelenko are begging their patients to return extra doses, because the pharmacies have run out. For that matter, patients who rely on chloroquine for long-standing conditions like lupus or arthritis can’t get their meds either.
And, what do you find in the mass media? For the most part,
stories like this unmitigated bullshit that appeared in the LA Times today.
And all of this is happening as a sequel to the fiasco which allowed this disease to multiply unhindered in the US for six weeks while the CDC was struggling to come up with a working test kit, and refusing help from China or Germany. One almost might think that the Trump administration and the billionaire mass media want to kill as many Americans as possible.
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