Dr. Oz shares great news: Hydroxychloroquine shows real promise against coronavirus

Two weeks ago, I interviewed outspoken French infectious disease specialist Dr. Didier Raoult, who had just released hastily gathered data on a small group of patients treated for COVID-19 in his Marseille hospital. He believed that a combination of the Malaria drug hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin (often sold as Z-Pak) could meaningfully reduce the amount of virus released by patients and make them less infectious. A week later, he released data on 80 sequential patients on this protocol, which revealed few side effects and better results than experts would expect, but drawing conclusions without a randomized control group is difficult. The American medical community and the Food and Drug Administration appropriately expect large, randomized trials before supporting widespread use of drugs. Thus, despite the embrace of countries such as China and Turkey, which include hydroxychloroquine in their official protocols for managing COVID-19, we awaited more data.

During my interviews with Dr. Raoult, he shared that Chinese researchers had already embarked on randomized trials based on a simple observation. Physicians at the Renmin Hospital of Wuhan University noted that of 178 novel coronavirus patients admitted by the hospital since December 2019, none of them were systemic lupus erythematosus patients taking hydroxychloroquine. Meanwhile, none of 80 patients with lupus treated with this medication were infected with novel coronavirus pneumonia. This raises the tantalizing possibility that hydroxychloroquine may prevent infection, a hypothesis currently being studied in a clinical trial at my institution, NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia University.

In the middle of a devastating pandemic, this clue also catalyzed efforts to treat patients with infections. Dr. Zhan Zhang and her respected team initiated a randomized trial, the results of which they just released to the world this week, even prior to peer review and publication because of the urgent demands of the coronavirus pandemic. The small study looked at 62 total patients diagnosed with early COVID-19 disease. Thirty-one were randomly assigned to either a control or an experimental group. The control group received standard treatment of oxygen therapy, antivirals, antibiotics, and immunomodulators. The experimental group received the standard treatment plus 400 mg of hydroxychloroquine per day fo... (Read more)

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