What if hydroxychloroquine doesn’t work? What if it does? Right now, we don’t know
An old malaria medicine, hydroxychloroquine, has gone viral on the internet. But is it really an antiviral drug?
The medicine has been seen as a potential treatment for Covid-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, almost since outbreaks started. This week it made headlines, due in part to tweets from President Trump and in part because of a small French study of 42 patients that seemed to show that hydroxychloroquine, particularly when combined with the antibiotic azithromycin, helped decrease patients’ levels of coronavirus. Unfortunately, the rumors about the drug’s efficacy have also encouraged some to buy and even consume a similarly named fish tank cleaner; one person has died.
