UK DOCS TAG HYDROXYCHLOROQUINE AS USELESS VS COVID-19

British scientists halted a major drug trial on Friday after it found that the anti-malarial hydroxychloroquine, touted by US President Donald Trump as a potential “game changer” in the pandemic, was “useless” at treating COVID-19 patients, Kate Kelland and Alistair Smout wrote for Reuters on June 5, 2020 (June 6, 2020 in Manila.)

“This is not a treatment for COVID-19. It doesn’t work,” Martin Landray, an Oxford University professor who is co-leading the RECOVERY trial, told reporters. “This result should change medical practice worldwide. We can now stop using a drug that is useless.”

Vocal support from Trump raised expectations for the decades-old drug that experts said could have been a cheap and widely available tool, if proven to work, in fighting the pandemic, which has infected more than 6.4 million people and killed nearly 400,000 worldwide, about 110,000 of them in the US.

Landray, a professor of medicine and epidemiology at Oxford University, noted the “huge speculation” about the drug as a treatment for COVID-19 but said there had been until now “an absence of reliable information from large randomized trials.” He said the preliminary results from RECOVERY, which was a randomized trial, were now quite clear: Hydroxychloroquine does not reduce the risk of death among hospitalised patients with COVID-19. “If you’re admitted to hospital, don’t take hydroxychloroquine,” he said. #COVID19