Meanwhile a few experts are cautitiously optimistic about this, from WEBMD
COVID-19: Could Hydroxychloroquine Really Be the Answer?
Excerpt:
What your doctor is reading on Medscape.com:
MARCH 18, 2020 -- Could the old generic malaria drug hydroxychloroquine (
Plaquenil, Sanofi-Aventis, among others), which is also used for the treatment of rheumatic disease, be an essential treatment for COVID-19?
This hypothesis, put forward by some, including Professor Didier Raoult of the IHU Méditerranée Infection in Marseille, was dismissed by other eminent infectious disease specialists and dismissed as fake news recently by the Ministry of Health.
Yet it resurfaced yesterday with the
presentation on YouTube by Prof Raoult of positive results in a non-randomised, unblinded trial of 24 patients.
This follows encouraging in vitro results obtained by a Chinese team led by Xueting Yao, from Peking University Third Hospital, Beijing, China, which were
published online by the journal
Clinical Infectious Diseases on March 9th. However, the data were deemed insufficient by the infection community to recommend the compound as a treatment.
LINK
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Trump had a good reason to push this medication, but left it up to the doctors to decide on using them. That is why the FDA approved the use of the medication, to allow doctors the legal freedom to determine their use.