Studies have been less controversial, but still not conclusive. In an observational study, researchers looked at the outcomes of patients with moderate or severe Covid-19 who either were or were not given HCQ. Based on their analysis, the scientists determined that HCQ had no effect on patient outcomes. Although this study seems quite strong, it was not randomized. Some individuals received HCQ and some did not, but the members of both groups were not necessarily equivalent. Moreover, the authors only analyzed patients who had been hospitalized. The effects of HCQ on individuals with less severe disease was not investigated. However, HCQ has been widely used as a treatment for curing COVID-19 but it is not vaccine & does not help cure COVID-19. There are different types of Hydroxylchloroquine (HCQ) available which are toxic & hazardous to health which can result in the death of a person , one must not consume without prior advise from doctors.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) made a controversial decision in March when it authorized the drugs chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine to be added to the Strategic National Stockpile, allowing doctors to prescribe them to patients with COVID-19, commonly known as the coronavirus. The move came a week after President Donald Trump tweeted an endorsement of the drugs, saying they “have a real chance to be one of the biggest game changers in the history of medicine.”


On Monday, May 18, Trump revealed in a press briefing that he has been taking hydroxychloroquine “for about a week and a half … every day.” This is despite the fact that in late April, the FDA issued a warning against using the drugs outside of hospital settings or clinical trials, due to the drugs’ potential impacts on heart rhythms.

What exactly do these drugs do, and can they actually treat coronavirus? Or is this another case of coronavirus misinformation? Here’s what you need to know.

What is Chloroquine?


Chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine are medications commonly used to treat malaria, a widespread and dangerous disease that afflicts hundreds of millions of people around the world. Malaria is not caused by a virus, but a very different source: Plasmodium parasites that are carried by mosquitoes, which spread the parasites to humans when they bite.
These drugs also inhibit the immune system, which makes them useful for treating autoimmune diseases, like rheumatoid arthritis, in which a person’s immune system registers part of the body as foreign and attacks it.

Why is it in the news now?

When the President of the United States hypes up a drug in the middle of a global pandemic, it gets attention. Trump’s enthusiasm for chloroquine followed a French study conducted by Didier Raoult, a microbiologist with a history of courting controversy. Raoult and his fellow researchers published a paper in which they found that coronavirus patients treated with hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin showed a reduction in the virus.
Given the desperation for a cure, and the fact that a vaccine likely won’t be out until 2021 at the earliest, the hype around chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine is understandable, but is it warranted?
We reached out to professor Art Reingold, an expert on epidemiology at the University of California, Berkeley, for his thoughts on the issue. Reingold reiterated that viruses are very different from parasites, so chloroquine’s ability to deal with one has nothing to do with the other.
“The theory underlying why chloroquine might help in COVID-19 cases is based mostly on lab studies and uncontrolled case series in which some patients given the medication did well,” he said, adding that “they might have done just as well without it. That is why properly designed clinical trials, comparing how patients given the drug do in comparison to patients given a placebo, are essential/underway.”
It’s important to remember that the studies on chloroquine/hydroxychloroquine and coronavirus patients, including the French study that pushed this into the mainstream, have involved a small number of subjects.
Chloroquine has demonstrated some antiviral properties in the past. As a recent study published in Nature explains, “chloroquine is known to block virus infection by increasing endosomal pH required for virus/cell fusion, as well as interfering with the glycosylation of cellular receptors of SARS-CoV.”
That same study demonstrated that chloroquine could impact COVID-19 in vitro, meaning outside the human body. It’s too early to draw any conclusions about whether or how these drugs could be a viable treatment for coronavirus.

Recent studies are skeptical 

A group of researchers recently conducted a study (currently awaiting peer review) examining data on U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs patients with coronavirus. It looked at the results for those who were treated without hydroxychloroquine, with hydroxychloroquine alone, and with hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin.
The researchers found “no evidence that use of hydroxychloroquine, either with or without azithromycin, reduced the risk of mechanical ventilation in patients hospitalized with COVID-19,” adding that “an association of increased overall mortality was identified in patients treated with hydroxychloroquine alone.” For patients treated with hydroxychloroquine alone, the death rate was 27.8 percent.
The current guidelines from the National Institutes of Health state that there isn’t enough evidence to recommend chloroquine or hydroxychloroquine for coronavirus patients.
Although research on these drugs could be valuable, the hype is problematic. As mentioned, these drugs are already facing shortages, and given their use for other conditions like malaria and rheumatoid arthritis, people for whom those drugs have been proven to work may find themselves with a problem.
Hydroxychloroquine has tragic consequences

“Follow the science” — these are reassuring words in a pandemic like Covid-19, when widespread fear of a deadly virus can be exploited by unscrupulous politicians, snake-oil salesmen and cranks. Public trust in scientists has risen recently.
But we may be hitting the limits of this trust, just as many countries enter the crucial phase of reopening their economies with a raft of new social-distancing measures meant to ward off a second wave of infections. We’ve seen several confusing U-turns and unresolved debates on issues such as the effectiveness of cloth masks or the risks of reopening schools. Faith in authority is ebbing globally, even in high-trust countries like Sweden, where a famously hands-off approach to lockdown is spreading ripples of doubt. And now the messy rush to find a treatment that works — even if it means throwing long-standing scientific standards out of the window — is veering from farce to tragedy.
Last week, highly respected and peer-reviewed journal The Lancet retracted a bombshell study that suggested hydroxychloroquine, a contested potential treatment for Covid-19, was linked to an increased risk of death and heart ailments. The sheer scale of the retrospective analysis, drawn from more than 96,000 patients in 671 hospitals, had been enough to convince institutions running several global trials of the drug (including the World Health Organization) to slam on the brakes. Only afterward did odd inconsistencies in the data, such as an inflated number of victims in Australia, lead to questions about how exactly its provider, Surgisphere Corp., had compiled it. A lack of convincing answers — flagged by the paper’s own co-authors — led to the retraction. Other studies in other journals have subsequently been retracted.
This kind of embarrassment is nothing new, even for The Lancet, which in 2010 retracted a paper linking autism to vaccines — 12 years after it was first published. We should be thankful this case was dealt with quickly.
But the damage can’t be undone. Yet more precious time studying potential treatments for Covid-19 has been lost, and the retraction played into the hands of conspiracy theorists who promote the unsubstantiated idea that special interests want hydroxychloroquine, a generic drug, out of the running. (The drug’s top supporter, French scientist Didier Raoult, used the hashtag “#LancetGate” on social media.) Surgisphere has defended its approach to consolidating medical records using artificial intelligence and machine learning, according to Bloomberg News, and says it’s not responsible for the source data.


This is a wake-up call for how the public, the media and the scientific community evaluate research, even the gold standard of peer-reviewed papers. In theory, it should be hard to game the system that underpins journals, which ask relevant experts to confidentially review papers ahead of publication. But, in practice, there are problems. Over the years, researchers have pointed to a lack of consistency and objectivity in responses by peers; a 2012 study found that when papers have been retracted there was often some kind of misconduct involved, including suspected or confirmed fraud. The lack of credit and scientific glory involved in reviewing a paper, along with the knowledge that other people will analyze the study too, might be hurting the quality of gate-keeping.
Whatever flaws already existed in scientific research have been supercharged by the pandemic. Hurried trials have sacrificed rigor for speed, and there has been a “rush to publish” the results in scientific journals, according to Jeffrey Aronson, clinical pharmacologist at the Center for Evidence-Based Medicine at Oxford University. In the case of hydroxychloroquine, the bias toward getting any kind of information out has led to hastily drawn conclusions on both its effectiveness and its dangers in treating Covid-19. That’s meant that the political and social-media fights over the drug have preceded clear results.
This has done sufferers of Covid-19 no favors: While the peak of the novel coronavirus outbreak has come and gone across most of Asia and Europe, major trials have been repeatedly delayed as exaggerated hype and conflicting studies make enrolling patients harder. We still don’t know how decisive a new U.K. study from Oxford published on Friday, finding that hydroxychloroquine offered no benefit, will be.
More caution, more rigor and more tightening of the peer-review system would be positive consequences of this debacle. But so much time has been lost already. The danger now is that if a severe flare-up in infections were to strike, we would still lack clear evidence of any existing, cheap treatment — and we would also have frittered away the public trust needed to successfully impose measures such as lockdowns or quarantines. “Follow the science” won’t be an effective rallying cry much longer.