The Fight Against Hydrochloroquine

Coronavirus and Corruption all around I see.

When the World Health Organisation declared a global Coronavirus pandemic early this year, chloroquine (CQ), and its modern form hydroxychloroquine (HCQ), were obvious candidates for an antidote. HCQ’s possible effectiveness against SARS had been noted since at least 2005. (Both CQ & HCQ have been effective anti-malarial drugs for decades and the patents on both expired long ago).

Scientists and doctors around the world took note of early promising clinical trials of HCQ in China. In France, Professor Didier Raoult, one of the world’s most published microbiologists, said HCQ should be tested more widely. Raoult’s subsequently successful trials of HCQ led to the “Marseilles Treatment” for Covid-19 infection.

Didier Raoult and other leading advocates of HCQ recommend that it should be used in the early stages of Covid-19, or even prior to developing the syndrome, as a prophylactic (a preventative measure). Should the patient show the early symptoms of Covid-19 infection, a course of the Marseilles Treatment can begin, which is HCQ with the antibiotic azithromycin (HCQ+AZ) plus zinc sulphate.

Didier Raoult is not alone in demonstrating the success of HCQ in treating Covid-19, as a “prophylactic” to prevent the later more severe & possibly fatal symptoms of Covid-19, which come from the immune response known as the “Cytokine storm”.

HCQ is being prescribed successfully against Covid-19 outside the USA and Europe, notably in Brazil and India. But in most Western countries, the licence for HCQ treatment of Covid-19 has been withdrawn.

Big Pharma sees the panic over Covid-19 as a wonderful opportunity to make huge profits from newly patented vaccines. Especially if governments oblige by making vaccination against Covid-19 compulsory. So any cheap and effective preventive medicine against Covid-19 is seen as a mortal foe by Big Pharma. HCQ is such a foe. Big Pharma is determined to destroy HCQ’s reputation by any means necessary.

In response to the Coronavirus pandemic, the Recovery (“Randomised Evaluation of COVid-19 thERapY”) programme of treatment trials began in Britain on 3rd March. It is supervised by two professors from Oxford University, Peter Horby and Martin Landray. One “arm” of the Recovery trials was evaluation of HCQ.

On the 16th June, the UK’s Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) suspended the HCQ “arm” of the Recovery Trial programme. The MHRA’s press release said that the Recovery Trial “has provided no convincing evidence of meaningful mortality benefit in hospitalised patients with Covid-19.”

But when patients are hospitalised, their Covid-19 disease is too far advanced for HCQ treatment. Anyway, ignoring that pettifogging detail, Dr June Raine, MHRA’s Chief Executive Officer, declared that “Neither hydroxychloroquine nor chloroquine are licensed to treat Covid-19 related symptoms or to prevent infection.”

However, the Recovery trial of HCQ has been exposed as nonsense. On 5th June, the Deputy Chief Investigator of the Recovery Trial, Professor Martin Landray, granted an interview to France-Soir, the French online newspaper. What he said about the Recovery trial is amazing, when you consider that the recommended HCQ dose for an adult is no more than 200—400 mg per day.

Professor Martin Landray said that across 175 UK hospitals, the 1542 Recovery patient participants in the HCQ Trial were given 2400 mg of HCQ (six times the recommended maximum dose of 400 mg) in the first twenty-four hours. That was followed by ten days at 800 mg, twice the recommended maximum dose.

That 2400 mg dose compares with 600 mg in the first 24 hours of Didier Raoult’s “Marseilles Treatment” at IHU-Marseille. In France, 1800 mg of HCQ in a day is considered to be lethal poisoning requiring hospital treatment. It is surprising that only 396 of Recovery’s HCQ patients died, giving a mortality rate of 26 percent, high enough to discredit HCQ as a treatment for Covid-19.

As well as massively overdosing patients with HCQ, Horby & Landray withheld zinc sulphate. And in any case, these were patients who were in hospital with the later more severe symptoms of Covid19, too late by then for HCQ treatment.

Explaining that the HCQ dose was chosen using computer-generated algorithmic mathematical models, Professor Martin Landry told France-Soir :

“The doses were chosen on the basis of pharmacokinetic modelling, and these are in line with the sort of doses that you use for other diseases such as amoebic dysentery..For a new disease such as Covid, there is no approved dosing protocol. But the HCQ dosage used is not dissimilar to that used, as I said, in for example amoebic dysentery.”  Landray did not mention that Hydroxyquinoline — a different drug from HCQ — is used for the treatment of amoebic dysentery.

On 11th June Professor Peter Horby tried to rescue his underling in another French newspaper, Liberation. There he claimed that Martin Landray did not speak of amoebic dysentery, but of “hepatic abscess of the liver”. However that is a complication of amoebic dysentery. And in any case, Professor Landray spoke of “amebiasis”, which is infection with amoebas that causes dysentery, in other words amoebic dysentery.

While trying to justify their overdoses of HCQ, the two Oxford professors were talking nonsense. Their Recovery trial was designed to make sure that HCQ failed. Their overdoses of HCQ were high enough to kill some patients. Zinc sulphate, a necessary part of the treatment, was omitted. And patients are in hospital anyway because they are already past the earlier symptoms of Covid-19 infection, too late for HCQ treatment.

The Recovery Trial’s “core funding” (its running costs) has come from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and the Wellcome Trust, among others. Oxford University is running trials of a Covid-19 vaccine, in partnership with AstraZeneca, a major drug company.

The truth is there for all to see.