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Gimme Some of That Hydroxychloriquine!
One of the oddest and most fascinating debates about this whole COVID thing is the battle of studies over the 60-year-old anti-malaria drug, Hydroxychloriquine (treatment often also includes Zythromax, a commonly-used, broad-spectrum anti-biotic, and Zinc supplements) being used “off label.” Its use for such off-label purposes has been approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
Ever since President Trump lauded early reports of its successful use to treat some COVID patients, it seems a lot of “experts” have been on a quest to disprove its reported effectiveness. You would think people would be interested in any potential treatment until a vaccine is successfully developed.
You would be wrong. Social media went ablaze recently when a highly respected British Medical Journal, The Lancet, published a study that claimed the drug was not only ineffective for treating COVID but harmed some people. It looked legit on the surface. And it countered lots of other studies and reports from doctors on the effectiveness of Hydroxy for treating many COVID patients, at least early in the process. And of course, when Trump announced he was on a two-week regime, people went nuts.
But now we’re finding out that the study has potentially serious gaps and flaws. It is now being referred to as “Lancetgate.” If this interests you, this Spectator USA piece is nicely written, detailed, and well documented.
If I come down with COVID, my first call will be to my doctor to ask for the Hydroxy-cocktail.
Published in General
Humans are susceptible to human nature for some reason.
FIFY.
I believe they are very serious gaps and flaws. Nothing potential about it.
The study might even be based on doctored data. Pardon the pun.
Already have mine in the medicine cabinet, together with a Z-Pack thanks to medical connections in the family. Been taking Elderberry/Zinc supplements and upped dose of D3 for a over a month now. Recently started high dose Vitamin C supplement (powder) — all to boost immune system.
The Left would rather people get sick and die than have to acknowledge anything good might have been said or done by Trump.
Big Pharma owns the medical journals and nightly news. Intellectual gate-keepers have been installed everywhere to control all “science” to fit the narrative.
As usual, The Bee is on it.
I love the The Bee. Their podcast is usually pretty good too.
First I hope you don’t come down with Wuflu but, if you do, I hope your Doctor can get Hydroxy for you. The use of Hydroxy as a treatment seems to scare the left so much that they are actually, in some States, telling pharmacies not to prescribe it. I first heard about this on March 3 or 4th on Laura Ingraham. I called my Doc to get a script for me and my wife. CVS would not prescribe it, even under his authority. Two days later the President comes out and says, “What have you got to lose?” I called my Doctor back and this time they made it available. It’s only gotten more difficult since then, even though it is a highly available and very inexpensive drug. I believe the left thinks it might actually work as a treatment and are afraid it might actually allow people to go back to work and to living a regular life. The studies so far have either been rigged, like the VA study and now the Lancet joke, or they have dragged them out in just the opposite of “warp speed”. It’s now been 3 months. I’d like to see some real results of honest studies. Wouldn’t you @soupguy?
Trump derangement syndrome kills. These are hardly Trump-friendly sources implicitly or explicitly admitting it:
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/06/mysterious-company-s-coronavirus-papers-top-medical-journals-may-be-unraveling
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/29/health/coronavirus-hydroxychloroquine.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/19/us/politics/hydroxychloroquine-trump-coronavirus.html
The observations from docs in the field looks like it’s useful in early stages of COVID-19. Reasonable looking studies show that it’s not much use once someone is sick enough to be in the hospital. What Lancet did was to confirm that.
There are case reports of people improving after they get very sick. I’m not saying the reports are invalid, sometimes the receiver does catch that Hail Mary pass, but I don’t think that’s the way to bet. It sure looks as though the critical point is when the immune response becomes heavily dysregulated. All the conditions that predispose to bad outcomes are ones with some form or severity of immune dysregulation; the “cytokine storm” was already underway when that person inhaled the virus though it was still just a tropical depression or the early stages of one. Not all autoimmune conditions heavily predispose to bad outcome; there’s a lot we still don’t know.
The studies are all saying that hydroxychloroquine doesn’t help once the hurricane has started. I get that it’s harder to put together multicenter trials with the centers being freestanding offices and small medical groups. But if you have reports that say “in the very early stages” why keep studying hospitalized patients and claim that studies on very sick people refute the observations on ambulatory patients in the early stages of the illness?
One of the problems Dr Zelenko faced was the several days between collecting a specimen for SARS-CoV-2 testing and getting the results back. There are now useful rapid PCR tests. If he’d had them when he started, with the number of patients he saw, we’d probably have good data. OK, we’ve got them. What’s happening? Not much.
I searched PubMed for <PCR> AND <outpatient> AND <COVID-19> AND <hydroxychloroquine>. I got ZERO results. Not one published paper. I searched Medrix (the preprint server for medicine.) That search returned a couple of small and/or crappy studies, one reasonable looking proposal for a methodology for studying early intervention and that’s it.
This stinks.
Western, DonG, cdor, ctlaw, and On the Left coast, all nailed it.
Great post BucknellDad!
This HCQ situation is simply outrageous. Dr Fauci, these medical journals, and the Media all have buckets full of blood on their hands.
The NIH, FDA and CDC all need to be investigated and most likely most of the upper management need to be throw in jail for good. Tens of thousands of Americans are dead from their actions.
The best case study I know of is South Korea. As of a couple days ago since the FDA recommended against the use of HCQ on April 21st, over 62,000 Americans have died from COVID-19, while in South Korea, a country that has used HCQ extensively with intense testing and no quarantine btw, since that date only 29 people have died in a country that is one sixth the size of America. America has had over 300 times the number of people die per capita than South Korea since that date, and South Korea was hit with the CoronaVirus harder and earlier than we were. With only 4.3% of the world’s population and 28% of the world’s deaths to COVID, the response to the pandemic of our medical ‘elite” bureaucracy is arguably far and away the worst in the world. We have been more than let down, we have been attacked and made to suffer tremendous harm that will have lasting effects for a long time by our incredibly corrupt and insane Leftist bureaucracy. They are simply murderers.
Finally some good news!
From William Jacobsen at Legal Insurrection:
“In reality, the virus clinically no longer exists in Italy,” said Alberto Zangrillo, the head of the San Raffaele Hospital in Milan in the northern region of Lombardy, which has borne the brunt of Italy’s coronavirus contagion.
“The swabs that were performed over the last 10 days showed a viral load in quantitative terms that was absolutely infinitesimal compared to the ones carried out a month or two months ago,” he told RAI television.
Italy has the third highest death toll in the world from COVID-19, with 33,415 people dying since the outbreak came to light on Feb. 21. It has the sixth highest global tally of cases at 233,019.
However new infections and fatalities have fallen steadily in May and the country is unwinding some of the most rigid lockdown restrictions introduced anywhere on the continent.”
There are lots of treatments that only work in one phase of a disease.
The irrational hatred for HCQ is just stunning. It’s not just that it might not be useful, it is that it is evil because Orange Man Bad.
The Lancet has serious bad form when it comes to Israel. Karma!
Regarding the possible degradation of the lethality of COVID-19, Chris Martenson of Peak Prosperity blog, a PHD in pathology, has speculated that since it almost certain that COVID-19 came from a lab, the disease likely is very unstable as compared to viruses that came from nature. And if I am understanding him right the human infectious feature ( the Petrovsky study has shown that COVID-19 is much more infectious to humans than animals, an almost impossibility if the virus sprang from nature), the polybasic furin cleavage site which causes the human transmission function, almost surely one of the lab insertions, would have a higher probability to be unstable and rendered ineffective over time, thus causing the infectious nature of the disease to be lessened.
The key finding of the Italian health official is that the viral load transmitted by the recent strains of the disease is significantly less than before. A high viral load was what was causing so much death. Also the likelihood of a significantly lower viral load makes the disease much more likely to be tamed by HCQ.
It’s an American Spectator piece, not a Spectator USA piece. If the piece had been published in The Spectator (or Spectator USA) it would have gotten more attention since that publication is right of center, but not quite conservative by American standards — it is a British publication after all.
The American Spectator is more partisan, and it will be harder for the piece to garner attention in the mainstream media.
This is getting more coverage than I thought. It’s made the Wall Street Journal‘s opinion page.
There’s hope after all.
Yes, this country has gone insane. If Donald Trump declared that lemonade is his favorite beverage you would see thousand of restaurants remove it from their menus, and leftists would boycott county fairs that still had lemonade stands.