Hydroxychloroquine & other Covid 19 treatments

Gilead: Twenty-one billion reasons to discredit hydroxychloroquine

Introduction

In the history of medicine, no single drug has been so singularly attacked by the media, World Health Organization, government officials and institutional health experts as hydroxychloroquine. Approved as a “safe and cost-effective” essential medicine by the WHO, CDC and regulatory authorities across Europe, hydroxychloroquine has been prescribed to millions of patients over the past 65 years. Despite decades of known safety, hydroxychloroquine was labelled “dangerous” and a “poisonous substance” after showing promise as a therapeutic for COVID-19. 

Many attribute this negative publicity to anti-Trump sentiment from mainstream media outlets including CNN, MSNBC, Washington Post, New York Times and Huffington Post. This thesis does not entirely hold up to scrutiny though. President Trump named both hydroxychloroquine and Gilead’s remdesivir as a “game changer” in his breaking March 19th press conference. 

There are promising therapies produced by Gilead, and that’s remdesivir. Remdesivir. And that’s a drug used for other purposes that’s been out and has had very good results for other purposes, but it seems to have a very good result, having to do with this virus...So you have remdesivir and you have chloroquine and hydro- — hydroxychloroquine. So those are two that are out now, essentially approved for prescribed use. And I think it’s going to be very exciting. I think it could be a game changer...Very powerful. They’re very powerful. 
- President Donald J. Trump, March 19th, 2020. 11:31 AM EDT [1]

At the time of the press conference, there was only in vitro evidence of remdesivir’s effectiveness against SARS-CoV-2. No clinical trial existed showing remdesivir to be effective. [2] The preliminary results from the NIH clinical trial were not available until over a month later on April 29. [3] The evidence of its efficacy primarily stemmed from a few in vitro studies that included an article published in the Nature-owned journal Cell Research. Interestingly, the Nature publication demonstrated that both remdesivir and chloroquine were effective against SARS-CoV-2, stating “remdesivir and chloroquine are highly effective in the control of 2019-nCoV infection in vitro.” [4] While there was only in vitro evidence of successes with remdesivir, there was both in vitro and clinical evidence of hydroxychloroquine’s efficacy. [5] Nevertheless, scientists, including Dr. Fauci, as well as the WHO and media outlets worldwide criticized Trump for providing false hope on the therapeutic effect of hydroxychloroquine while staying quiet about remdesivir. 

The effort to undermine hydroxychloroquine appears to have begun months prior to Trump’s announcement. Chloroquine was first shown to have strong antiviral effects on SARS-CoV infection in primate cells back in the 2005 publication "Chloroquine is a potent inhibitor of SARS coronavirus infection." [6] Pharmaceutical companies were likely aware that if hydroxychloroquine was shown to be effective against SARS-CoV-2 it would diminish the value of patented therapeutics or vaccines. Through lobbying efforts, regulation may have been the first step to control the availability of hydroxychloroquine. 

This may have been what occurred in France. Hydroxychloroquine was available without prescription in France for years. This came to an end on January 13, 2020, when hydroxychloroquine was classified “in all its forms” as a “list II poisonous substance.” [7] After decades of widespread use, hydroxychloroquine quickly became a restricted substance in France in the earliest days of the COVID-19 pandemic. Just several weeks later, Dr. Didier Raoult in the South of France would report his landmark clinical trial demonstrating hydroxychloroquine’s efficacy against COVID-19. [5] 

Why was hydroxychloroquine—a drug safely used for over half a century—aggressively labeled dangerous while a medication that proved ineffective for hepatitis C with an unknown safety profile got a pass? Herein I outline the evidence showing hydroxychloroquine to be a direct threat to Gilead’s success as well as the massive sphere of influence Gilead has over government taskforces, the World Health Organization, medical journals, academic institutions and research scientists. These organizations provided ammunition for the media’s war on doctors prescribing hydroxychloroquine.

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