A “Game Changer” Cure for COVID-19?

CHATTER ABOUT a promising drug to fight Covid-19 has been doing the rounds on social media platforms, as chatter often does – let’s take a closer look. 

President Trump called Hydroxychloroquine a “Game Changer”

Many of us had never heard of Hydroxychloroquine until President Trump stated in a recent Press Conference that the drug had shown “very very encouraging early results” against COVID-19.  He stated “Hydroxychloroquine has been around for a long time so we know that if things don’t go as planned it’s not going to kill anybody.  

 

 

We are making this drug available almost immediately, normally the FDA would take a long time to approve something like this, it is now approved, by prescription.  Individual states will handle it.  Doctors will handle it.  And I think it’s going to be great”.

So What is Hydroxychloroquine?

Often called Chloroquine for short, Hydroxychloroquine is commonly used to prevent and treat Malaria and is also prescribed for Lupus, autoimmune diseases and serious arthritis it is a very powerful drug.  

Chloroquine’s use dates back as far as World War II, it is derived from the bark of the chinchona tree, and like quinine, it is a centuries-old antimalarial.  Which means the drug is now generic and relatively cheap (something Big Pharma is not going to like). 

In the early 1990s researchers proposed it as an early protease inhibitor drug to help treat HIV/AIDS

So what do Malaria and COVID-19 have in common?  On the surface, not much. Malaria is a disease that is caused by a parasite, unlike COVID-19.  Nevertheless, laboratory studies show Chloroquine is effective at preventing as well as treating the virus that causes Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) a close cousin of COVID-19.

Could a decades-old Malaria drug work to treat COVID-19?  One man says it can and that he owes his life to the drug.  Here is his story as featured in the New York Post (link below).

“A Florida man diagnosed with Coronavirus claims he was saved from certain death by an anti-malaria drug touted as a possible treatment by President Trump.

Rio Giardinieri, 52, said he struggled with horrendous back pain, headaches, cough and fatigue for five days after catching COVID-19, possibly at a Conference in New York.

Doctors at the Memorial Regional Hospital in South Florida diagnosed him with Coronavirus and Pneumonia and put him on oxygen in ICU.

After more than a week, doctors told him there was nothing more they could do and, on Friday evening, Giardinieri said goodbye to his wife and three children.

“I was at the point where I was barely able to speak and breathing was very challenging,” Giardinieri said. “I really thought my end was there.”

Then a friend sent him a recent article about Hydroxychloroquine, a prescription drug used to treat Malaria for decades and auto-immune diseases like Lupus.

Overseas studies have found it to be promising as a treatment for COVID-19, though it hasn’t been approved by health officials.

“I was given all the reasons why I would probably not want to try it because there are no trials, there’s no testing, it was not something that was approved”.

“I said, ‘Look, I don’t know if I’m going to make it until the morning,’ because at that point I really thought I was coming to the end because I couldn’t breathe anymore.

“It was authorized by the doctor and 30 minutes later the nurse gave it to me.”

After about an hour of taking the pills, Giardinieri said, it felt like his heart was beating out of his chest and, around two hours later, he had another episode.

He says he was given Benadryl and some other drugs and that when he woke up around 4:45 a.m., it was “like nothing ever happened.”

Ever since he has had no fever or pain and can breathe again.  He said doctors believe the episodes he experienced were not a reaction to the medicine but his body fighting off the virus.

 “There is no doubt in my mind that I wouldn’t make it until morning, so for me, the drug saved my life.”

https://nypost.com/2020/03/22/florida-man-with-coronavirus-says-drug-touted-by-trump-saved-his-life/

The Expert’s Response

Center for Disease Control 

 “CDC is aware of reports of various medications being administered for either treatment or prophylaxis for COVID-19, including those demonstrating in vitro activity against SARS-CoV- 2. 

It is important to ensure robust clinical data, gathered from clinical trials, are obtained quickly in order to make informed clinical decisions regarding the management of patients with COVID-19.”

World Health Organisation (WHO)

 “WHO was prioritizing a couple of other drugs in testing along with Remdesivir.  For Chloroquine, there is no proof that it is an effective treatment at this time.”

And yet physicians are already using Chloroquine to treat Covid-19 patients. 

Montefiore Medical Center in New York is administering Chloroquine to patients with Covid-19.  The Chief of Infectious diseases at Albert Einstein College of Medicine and Montefiore states:- 

“All of our patients are put on Chloroquine, as well as on antiretrovirals. Different places are using different antiretrovirals. “Everybody gets that, unless they have some contraindication”.

Chloroquine has a chance of helping and the doctors are hoping it’ll do no harm.

Analysis

There are a mountain of differing opinions out there on this “game-changing drug” but one thing is clear we have to get this virus into perspective, to date the mortality rate of Covid-19 has been low, and as a result of this as of 19 March 2020 Covid-19 was officially no longer considered to be a High Consequence Infectious Disease (HCID) in the UK.  

Most people infected with the Covid-19 virus will experience mild to moderate illness and recover without requiring specialist treatment – typically Covid-19 presents with around         7 days of cold/flu-like symptoms and after a period of bed rest a full recovery will be made.

In areas where there have been spikes in numbers such as China, Iran, Italy, Spain and New York they appear to have two things in common a high elderly population and poor air quality/smog which can severely affect the respiratory system and the ability to fight the virus which must be taken into consideration – as should the recording of cases, recording cases where there was a positive test for the virus is a very different thing to recording the virus as the main cause of death.  

The French government has now officially sanctioned prescriptions of Chloroquine to treat certain Coronavirus patients as has the Montefiore Medical centre in New York – this would seem to be a very sensible approach to take on a case by case basis with medical expertise and patient consent it has already proven it can save lives. 

But will Big Pharma and vested interests allow this to continue – I will be watching this one very closely!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GKBydiPOcQc

https://abcnews.go.com/Health/chloroquine-malaria-drug-treat-coronavirus-doctors/story?id=69664561

https://www.gov.uk/guidance/high-consequence-infectious-diseases-hcid

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