Covid-19, SARS-Cov-2, vaccines, Remdesivir, Chloroquine...and all that Jazz

Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani said Sunday that he recently witnessed an elderly man with a high fever arrive at Mount Sinai Hospital, “and the first thing they did before they even talked to him was give him hydroxychloroquine.”
“Why is the governor banning it?” asked Mr. Giuliani, President Trump’s personal lawyer, on “Sunday Morning Futures.” “Everything shows that it works.”

From the US to Latin America to Europe, the request has come from several places which shows India’s importance in the global pharma sector. The government officials said while New Delhi is looking into the requests but will review domestic requirements first. Domestically India has allowed the use of hydroxychloroquine by medical and health care workers dealing with COVID-19 patients.

A Los Angeles doctor said he is seeing significant success in prescribing the malaria drug hydroxychloroquine in combination with zinc to treat patients with severe symptoms of COVID-19.

Additional production of hydroxychloroquine sulfate tablets is also being assessed and subsequently ramped up with materials that are being sent to Teva from our ingredient supplier. Teva will ship 6 Million tablets through wholesalers to hospitals by March 31, and more than 10 Million within a month.

Patients enrolled in this study were treated with oral hydroxychloroquine sulfate 200 mg (three times daily) at a hospital in Marseille (n=26) and those who refused treatment served as untreated controls in addition to untreated patients at hospitals in Nice, Avignon, and Brianço (n=16). Patients were not randomised to treatments; compared with control patients, treated patients were older (37.3 vs 51.2 years) and included a greater proportion of male (16.7% vs 45%) and symptomatic patients (75% vs 90%). Although 26 patients received active treatment, six of these were excluded from the analysis due to early cessation of treatment (transfer to intensive care units, death, or due to nausea). All 16 controls patients completed follow-up.

October 2019, as global protests were raging across the world, an agency no one had heard of made an astonishing decision.
“Painkiller tablets such as aspirin, paracetamol and ibuprofen will be placed behind pharmacy counters and no longer be freely available on shelves in France from January 15 2020, it has been confirmed…

Even as the experts from the medical field are rushing against the clock to find a cure for the fatal COVID-19, Dr Vladimir Zelenko, a board-certified family practitioner based in New York, claims to have successfully healed around 500 patients using a cocktail of hydroxychloroquine, azithromycin (Z-Pak), zinc sulfate.

These seemingly disparate FDA-approved antimicrobials display a common property of modulating pH of endosomes and trans-Golgi network. We believe this may in part help understand the potentially beneficial effects of CQ/HCQ and AZT in COVID-19, and that the present considerations of HCQ and AZT for clinical trials should be extended to CPX.

“We are not using it in outpatients, we're not using it in patients with mild infection, we are using it, however, in patients that are sick enough to be hospitalized with pneumonia that we feel are at risk of progressing their infection.” He adds, “We feel that there is data both from the early published studies as well as from our colleagues in China that have treated a number of patients to justify its use in the therapy of sicker patients that are hospitalized with coronavirus infection.”

• The Ministry of Health released its revised Guidelines on Clinical Management of COVID–19 late on March 31
• The guidelines add that the medication is presently not recommended for children less than 12 years, pregnant and lactating women

Hydroxychloroquine is now getting a lot of attention from hospitals and pharmaceutical companies after many studies showed the drug to be effective in the treatment of COVID-19 patients. Today, Novartis Chief Executive Vas Narasimhan said that his Sandoz generics unit’s malaria, lupus and arthritis drug hydroxychloroquine is the company’s biggest hope against the coronavirus, according to a report from Reuters, citing Swiss newspaper SonntagsZeitung.

A placebo-controlled, randomised trial evaluating the use of hydroxychloroquine in patients who have tested positive for Covid-19 and are being admitted to the hospital for Covid illness will begin enrolment next week, said investigator Dr Roy Brower, medical director, Medical Intensive Unit, Johns Hopkins Medicine, Baltimore, Maryland. The trial will enrol approximately 500 patients in multiple hospitals, but the patient number may go higher, he added.

Much interest has emerged recently about the potential role that chloroquine, a well-known anti-malarial agent, may play in the treatment of the novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2), the causative agent of the current COVID-19 pandemic. Both Italy and France have recently permitted the prescribing of a related drug, hydroxychloroquine, for treating COVID-19 infection. But does the existing evidence support the re-purposing of this old malaria drug for a new viral scourge?

Treatment withhydroxychloroquine only suitable for people “moderately“reached by Covid-19. A finding that has been demonstrated among their target. But once the patient is admitted to intensive care, this drug becomes less effective, said the Marseille infectiologist Didier raoult on the story of Sputniknews. “You have to be careful: when it is too late, it is too late, that is to say, when people are in intensive care, when they have respiratory distress syndromes, when they are forced to intubate them , it’s no longer time for antivirals “, said the infectious disease specialist.

Some pharmacies in Cameroon’s major towns and cities have been flooded with chloroquine described as fake by the national drug quality control laboratory in Cameroon.

Previous studies have shown that chloroquine phosphate (chloroquine) had a wide range of antiviral effects, including anti-coronavirus. Here we found that treating the patients diagnosed as novel coronavirus pneumonia with chloroquine might improve the success rate of treatment, shorten hospital stay and improve patient outcome. In order to guide and regulate the use of chloroquine in patients with novel coronavirus pneumonia, the multicenter collaboration group of Department of Science and Technology of Guangdong Province and Health Commission of Guangdong Province for chloroquine in the treatment of novel coronavirus pneumonia developed this expert consensus after extensive discussion.

Le Pr Didier Raoult, directeur de l'IHU Méditerranée-Infection à Marseille, est au coeur de la polémique autour de l'utilisation de de l'hydroxychloroquine dans l'infection Covid-19. Contacté plusieurs fois par « le Quotidien », l'infectiologue médiatique a répondu sous la forme d'une tribune. Pour le fer de lance de l'antipaludique, l'épidémie de coronavirus est l'occasion de remettre en place « une réflexion sur la morale du choix entre le soin et l’expérimentation ».

An international poll of more than 6,000 doctors finds that the antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine has been deemed the most highly rated treatment for the novel coronavirus.

There’s worrying news around the world of people self-medicating at home with the drugs chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine to treat Covid-19. There’s since been reports of chloroquine poisoning and even death after taking the drug. Scientists first reported chloroquine’s potential against coronaviruses after the SARS epidemic in 2003.

The prognosis of common COVID-19 patients is good. Larger sample size study are needed to investigate the effects of HCQ in the treatment of COVID-19. Subsequent research should determine better endpoint and fully consider the feasibility of experiments such as sample size.

The randomized trial looked at 62 patients admitted to Renmin Hospital at Wuhan University from Feb. 4 until Feb. 28. Half were treated with a five-day regimen of 400 milligrams of HCQ. The study excluded patients with several or critical cases of coronavirus.
Four patients in the study progressed to severe illness, but all of those were in the group not treated with the malaria drug.

Mayo Hospital CEO and Corona Advisory Group Co-Chairperson Professor Dr Asad Aslam on Thursday said that 18 COVID-19 patients have been successfully treated with anti-malaria drug Hydroxychloroquine and antibiotic Azithromycin during the past five days.