Breaking news! A cure for COVID-19. 100% success rate! True or False?
Disclaimer: My medical expertise is limited to applying a plaster with the sticky side down.
The old reliable Malaria drug chloroquine, the newer version hydroxychloroquine has shown really good, three studies, one in Australia, one in China and now one in France mixed with azithromycin, just the old Z-Pac that we take for bronchitis, has had 100%. It cleared the virus, in some cases in three days, that cocktail in every one of the patients in that study… It’s very promising, 100% of the virus gone in six days!
Gateway Pundit
There is an interesting Twitter thread covering this. Let’s pick out some highlights. Using Threadreader, starting partway through and skipping all the graphs. (You can study them at your self-isolating leisure.)
But the one that interests me is the French open-labeled non randomized clinical trial on HCQ + Azithromycin against #COVID19 infection, largely publicized. Details are here mediterranee-infection.com/wp-content/upl…
This is a small clinical trial (n=42 in total). Inclusion criteria in short moderate #COVID19 infection (positive viral load). Exclusion criteria, allergy, long QT syndrome…. In total 42 enrolled, 6 drop out including 3 in ICU. Total 20 HCQ vs 16 controls.
Clinical presentation seemed similar between HCQ & control but sample size is so low, difficult to conclude really. Seriously underpowered. Outcome from the study is based on viral load only and not on clinical outcome and I can see a major flaw here as clinical outcome critical.So 16 patient received no treatment, 14 patients received HCQ only (200 mg/ day) and 6 patients received HCQ (200 mg/day) + Azithromycin to prevent surinfection (on clinical judgement). The treatment was for 10 days and outcome on viral load (nasopharyngeal swabs)
The results showed a reduction of the viral load from HCQ and HCQ + Azithromycin treated patients compared to controls. Looks spectacular but wait …. No error base on these graphs. So I looked at the suppl dataLooking at supplementary Table 1, most of the controls had viral load qualitatively detected or the PCR was not done !!!! . Only 4 out of 16 controls had a proper measure of the viral load !!!! This is insane !
In short, all this hype on the clinical trial is based on a open label, non randomized and underpowered clinical trial on HCQ treatment against #COVID19 with viral load as an outcome that was not properly measured in 2/3 of the control cohort !!!
So to answer the question: What is the evidence of justifying using HCQ or CQ as a prophylactic or curative treatment against #COVID19. The simple or short answer is NONE. To ascertain it, we need a proper and powered randomized clinical trial
While I understand we are in a #COVID19 pandemic, there is no reason or whatsoever to throw away all the evidence based medicine and not doing rigorous science or a randomized clinical trial !
TL;DR summary – we simply don’t have enough quality data to make any significant claims as yet.
At the moment it seems that the safest thing is to take everything out there with a grain of salt.
Or listen to Dear Leader, as she is the sole source of truth – she told us that, and she never lies.