Posted on 05/01/2020 5:42:13 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
UCLA is one of seven sites participating in a clinical trial investigating whether hydroxychloroquine, a commonly used anti-malarial and autoimmune drug, can prevent infection with COVID-19.
The multi-site study led by the University of Washington in collaboration with six other university centers, is now enrolling 2,000 participants who are close contacts of persons who are confirmed or suspected to be infected with COVID-19. The aim is to determine whether hydroxychloroquine can prevent infection in people exposed to the virus.
"There has been a lot of speculation as to whether hydroxychloroquine can treat or prevent COVID-19," said Dr. Raphael J. Landovitz, professor of medicine, division of infectious diseases, at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and principal investigator at the UCLA site. "This study provides an important opportunity for Los Angeles to partner with UW and the other collaborators to help answer this question definitively."
The Food and Drug Administration supports the use of hydroxychloroquine in clinical trials investigating its effectiveness against COVID-19, but has issued a warning against its use outside of the setting of clinical trials or in treating hospitalized patients, where close safety monitoring can be assured.
The $9.5 million trial looking at post-exposure preventive therapy for COVID-19 is part of an initiative launched by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Wellcome, and Mastercard to speed development and access to therapies against the respiratory virus that has spread throughout the world. The COVID-19 Therapeutics Accelerator is funded by the three organizations and an array of government and private sector donors. The hydroxychloroquine trial is one of many approaches the group is funding.
Hydroxychloroquine has been used since the early 1950s to prevent malaria and treat autoimmune diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis and lupus. Hydroxychloroquine has a long track record of safety for these conditions, and is being studied in similar or lower doses for the prevention of COVID-19. The medication is hypothesized to prevent COVID-19 from infecting cells.
Trial participants are randomly assigned to take hydroxychloroquine or a placebo over two weeks, and nasal swab samples are collected and tested daily to confirm new COVID-19 infections across the two groups. Sandoz, a Novartis division, has donated the hydroxychloroquine doses for the study.
All trial participants will be carefully screened to ensure they do not have an allergy to the medication or a condition that could put them at high risk of any adverse side effects. They will also be monitored through telehealth consultations.
The trial is slated to run over eight weeks. The researchers expect to have answers by summer.
"We currently don't know if hydroxychloroquine works, but we will learn in as short a timeframe as possible what the outcome is," said Ruanne Barnabas, the trial's principal investigator and associate professor of global health at the University of Washington Schools of Medicine and Public Health. "Our goal is to stop transmission of COVID-19 in the community."
If the drug does not work, investigators can put their time and energy into other prevention and treatment interventions, Barnabas said.
Data from the trial will be shared via the open-access COVID-19 Therapeutics Accelerator website, once the site is active, to ensure scientists everywhere can benefit from its findings.
To learn more about the trial, please visit the study's web page.
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Media Contact
310-267-7022 UCLAHealthNews@mednet.ucla.edu
I stopped when I read Bill Gates and the Univ of Washington was involved. Untrustworthy.
Whatever you do, don’t use the most effective virus medication known to man. Wait for Bill Gates’ vaccine! /s
Will they be supplementing with zinc and/ or monitoring the participants’ zinc levels?
My guess is that something may be learned from the study but that they’re not trying to maximize the effectiveness of hydroxychloroquine.
Here is an Italian study
65,000 lupus patients
Only 20 got the virus
No hospital, no icu
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2020/04/media-lied-people-died-italian-study-finds-incredible-prophylaxis-results-patients-hydroxychloroquine/
Here is a study from South Korea
Careworkers nursing home
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S092485792030145X
To stop the return of manufacturing of products back to the US that went to China. China backers here who’s family members are making millions from China through their political connections will be hit hard are also claiming that Trump’s alleged stock ownership in a quinine pills maker claim its a controlling interest in a product to be totally ineffective and when used requires a severe restriction of movement when near a possible carrier known as a shutdown because of its alleged rapid transmission .
I read about the Italian study a day or so ago and googled it. I looked for it today and did a Google search. I couldn’t find it. I did find a reddit page with a message that stated that the story was removed for low quality. This is insane. Someone don’t want the truth to get out.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Coronavirus/comments/g9vlc2/italian_study_on_lupusra_and_hcq_our_of_65k_20/
A few words in the Italian magazine "Il Tempo" is not a study.
I have looked, but I can't find the source. While I would like for it to be accurate, I suspect the "65,000 lupus patients" story is fake news.
Here's a website that might eventually develop the sort of information that is supposedly in the elusive study:
So, everybody would be taking their “Trump Pills” leading up to the election?
The other side would rather have thousands die.
In a better world, Physicians would be free to consult with their patients as to which treatment they believe will be best, WITHOUT GOVERNMENT INTERFERENCE!
You know, what Patrick Henry said: “Give Me Liberty or give me death!”
Many trials of hydroxychloroquine are designed to fail because they deliberately omit zinc. HCQ requires high levels of zinc in the body to work well. Only some people have sufficient natural body levels of zinc for HCQ to block virus replication. Most people must take zinc pills along with HCQ for the therapy to work.
Evil dems would rather see people die than something President Trump recommends succeed.
This was the original article in Italian
In Italian a commenter of the original story said he had contacted the Italian RA agency and got this as a reply. Reply translated to English.
We are sorry to inform you that the journalist has misrepresented what we have communicated to him and that there is no investigation into patients using hydroxychloroquine in Italy.
The register of the Italian Society of Rheumatology (CONTROL-19) includes 150 patients with rheumatological diseases and of these 20 were taking hydroxychloroquine.
Unfortunately, we are receiving many similar risks, as the publication of the aforementioned article has created much confusion.
Trusting that we have clarified the misunderstanding, we send our best regards,
Luigi Sinigaglia - President of SIR
Without zinc supplementation, it is a crap shoot as to whether any patient or test subject has sufficient zinc levels to use the ionophoric action of the hydroxychloroquine which results in the arrest of viral replication by the zinc molecule. Once the hydroxychloroquine opens a portal (ionophore) and the
zinc passes into the cell, hydroxychloroquine’s job is done, finished. It doesn’t kill virus’. It just creates a doorway for the zinc.
This is why early treatment (with adequate zinc levels) is critical. Once the virus has had time to replicate and overwhelm the body’s defenses, the only thing that the hydroxychloroquine and zinc combination can do is keep the viral load from getting worse and that might be too late.
Accordingly, this study is designed to fail. Here is the takeaway line:
“If the drug does not work, investigators can put their time and energy into other prevention and treatment interventions, Barnabas said.”
But hey, they can say that they tried.
I have to say that it was discouraging to find so many conservative political websites parroting the unverified "65,000 lupus patients" story. I like to think of fake news as being owned by the left, but our side also pushes a few stories that are too good to check.
All we can hope is that eventually the results of this therapy in other countries will be impossible to deny. Such as the death and hosp rates in countries that use hydroxy early, much as Greece, Iceland, Poland and African countries where it is routinely used to prevent Malaria
Although this story may have been misinterpreted, I have been asking this question all along. There is a subsection of Americans that have been taking HCQ all along for R.A. and Lupus, and Malaria. What is their experience with Wuhan Virus? Why isn’t anyone gathering the data? They know who is taking the drug, how hard would a survey be? Just shaking my head, how dumb not to try to find oput.
https://www.iltempo.it/salute/2020/04/28/news/coronavirus-farmaci-efficaci-news-danni-cura-annalisa-chiusolo-artrite-terapia-idrossiclorochina-sars-cov2-1321227/
It's in Italian but Google Translate works well.
Cliff Notes Translation:
Out of 65,000 people in Italy who regularly take HCQ, only 20 became infected and NO ONE DIED!!!
Big Pharma and Dems shut down HCQ like a carpet bombing. Remdesivir Target price is $900-$1000 per treatment. Gileade is donating 1.5MM doses for trial. Soon, they will get reimbursement from CMMS, and be very rich heroes. Fauci loves them. Wonder if he’s on their board.
We’ve been had, 8 ways to Sunday.
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