Much of the mainstream media is now performing an end zone victory dance over the news that the World Health Organization has suspended clinical trials of hydroxychloroquine due to safety concerns. Typical of the coverage is this Politico story on Monday, "World Health Organization pauses study of hydroxychloroquine in global trial."
The World Health Organization is pausing the use of hydroxychloroquine in its global study of COVID-19 treatments amid a review of safety data, officials announced Monday.
The move follows findings from a large observational study, published Friday, that found increased risk of heart problems and death in COVID-19 patients who used chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine.
Now comes the key paragraph:
It’s a scientific decision nonetheless fraught with politics: U.S. President Donald Trump is a champion of hydroxychloroquine, revealing last week that he’s taking it to prevent COVID-19. He has threatened to cut off U.S. funding to the WHO within a month absent unspecified reforms.
Therefore for Politico and much of the MSM (as well as WHO) it boils down to showing how wrong the Big Bad Orange Man is.
The executive committee of the WHO’s Solidarity trial met on Saturday, said WHO Chief Scientist Soumya Swaminathan, and decided “in the light of this uncertainty that we should be proactive, err on the side of caution and suspend enrollment temporarily into the hydroxychloroquine arm.”
So what do these clinical trials of hydroxychloroquine entail? The media has demonstrated a complete lack of curiosity about this. However, since these WHO trials are being conducted by SOLIDARITY, you can find data on this information at Regulatory Affairs Professionals Society Society website page, "COVID-19 therapeutics tracker."
Potential therapies are being examined in several large international trials. The largest, SOLIDARITY, is led by the World Health Organization (WHO). More than 100 countries have joined SOLIDARITY to evaluate high-profile treatment candidates for COVID-19, including remdesivir; lopinavir/ritonavir with and without interferon beta-1a, and hydroxychloroquine/chloroquine.
I now direct the reader and anybody in the MSM who still has a bit of inconvenient curiosity to scroll down to "Trials: Hydroxychloroquine and/or chloroquine are being evaluated in these high-profile trials:" Just below that is a list of those trials with links that one can click to in order to view. One thing all those trials have in common is a certain something they all lack, namely ZINC. Yes, even though zinc (zinc sulphate) is the key ingredient when used with hydroxychloroquine for the treatment of COVID-19, it is absurdly not included anywhere in that list of clinical trials.
Notably not included in this SOLIDARITY list is New York's St. Francis Hospital clinical trial, NCT04370782. And why would that be? Perhaps the title of that clinical trial can provide a reason: Hydroxychloroquine and Zinc With Either Azithromycin or Doxycycline for Treatment of COVID-19 in Outpatient Setting.
COVID-19 is an aggressive and contagious virus, found to have high mortality especially in persons with comorbidities (Age>60, hypertension [HTN], diabetes mellitus [DM], Cancer, and otherwise immunocompromised). Zinc is a supplement with possible antiviral properties, having been shown to have effect in the common cold, many of which are due to coronavirus. In addition, elderly patients and patients with co-morbidities have high incidence of zinc deficiency. We are repleting zinc in all patients and studying its direct effect in combination with hydroxychloroquine, and an antibiotic, either azithromycin or doxycycline to see if there is enhanced treatment efficacy in early COVID-19 infection and assess the safety of these two regimen.
So while the MSM performs their absurd victory dances, they might want to consider what they are celebrating, namely the failure of laughably incomplete clinical trials in which a key ingredient is missing. It's like mixing charcoal and sulfur but not saltpeter and then pretending that gunpowder doesn't work.
