The Info War Over Chloroquine Has Slowed Covid-19 Science
ON MARCH 9, members of a team of infectious disease researchers based at the University of Minnesota found themselves with four free days. An HIV conference they were supposed to attend had been called off on account of the global pandemic, which gave the group an unusual moment of breathing space. “This was right when community spread was beginning to happen, and we realized it was going to be a problem,” says David Boulware, a physician and leader of the group. “We wanted to focus on prevention and early treatment. At the time, no one was really doing that.”
Even then, research interest was circling around the decades-old antimalarial drugs chloroquine and its cousin, hydroxychloroquine. Silicon Valley hadn’t yet turned its disrupt-o-vision on the drugs, but they killed the SARS-CoV-2 virus in the lab, and a small, preliminary study in China seemed to suggest they worked in actual people too. Because physicians were already allowed to prescribe the drugs—for malaria and immune disorders like rheumatoid arthritis and lupus—they were starting to use it, Hail Mary–style, on Covid-19 patients in the hospital. It was, in short, worth a look. But not, in Boulware’s mind, for people so sick they were already hospitalized. “Late-stage severe disease, there’s a lot of things going on with the virus and the immune system. We realized six weeks ago hydroxychloroquine probably didn’t work then,” he says. But what about if it was prescribed early, to prevent people from getting the disease, or from getting very sick if they did?
The team put together a plan for a double-blind, randomized, controlled trial—hydroxychloroquine versus a placebo. The US Food and Drug Administration gave them an Investigational New Drug approval to use the stuff in this new way. Just eight days after coming up with the idea, Boulware and his team enrolled the first subject into the trial, which is asking if the drug can help people in the early stages of Covid-19 infection and protect at-risk people such as health care workers and people taking care of infected family members.
And then things got more complicated. The day before that first subject signed up, on March 16, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk tweeted about the drug, sparking interest among the crowd that wants to extend its life with metformin and blood from young people. Three days later, President Donald Trump said during a Covid-19 press briefing that he thought the drugs “could be something very, very incredible,” sparking a run on pharmacies. Whether someone believed the drugs worked against Covid-19 came to be a symbol of how they felt about the president. And all that happened without any real, solid scientific results.
https://www.wired.com/story/the-info-war-over-chloroquine-has-slowed-covid-19-science/?utm_source=nl&utm_brand=wired&utm_mailing=WIR_Science_050120&utm_campaign=aud-dev&utm_medium=email&utm_term=WIR_Science&bxid=5be9f8cb24c17c6adf0e5d24&cndid=25394153&esrc=bounceX&source=EDT_WIR_NEWSLETTER_0_SCIENCE_ZZ
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