Can hydroxychloroquine help COVID patients early on? We need more science and less politics.

My father, who is 96 years old, felt suddenly fatigued back in March with some shortness of breath and fever. He laid down on his couch and said he didn’t think he was going to get up again. He has heart disease and a pacemaker, and his cardiologist weighed the options and agreed to start him on hydroxychloroquine. He was much better within a day.

I made the same decision in several patients with COVID-19 or suspected COVID-19 in my practice over the first few months of the pandemic, after prescreening them for risk of heart rhythm abnormalities. I understood that the benefits I saw were anecdotal and not strictly scientific.

Even so, I was glad when the Food and Drug Administration issued an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) for hospitals on March 28. A study in the journal Nature that month demonstrated hydroxychloroquine’s anti-viral activity against the SARS-CoV-2 virus responsible for COVID-19. There was also longtime evidence that the drug decreased inflammation that could lead to the “cytokine storm” that damages the lungs in severely ill COVID-19 patients.

Politics prevented thorough trial

There was every reason to be excited. The drug is incredibly cheap, a generic version is less than 50 cents per pill, and it has been around for more than 65 years. It has been well tolerated by millions as a treatment for various forms of arthritis and as a preventative against malaria.

But then the bad news began to pour in. With President Donald Trump championing the drug this spring, it became a third rail political issue, and studies (including one from New York, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in May) showed that the drug wasn’t effective against COVID-19 — at least very late in the game when the patient was dying and side effects of the drug were also more likely at that point.

Hydroxychloroquine pills in Provo, Utah, on May 20, 2020.
Hydroxychloroquine pills in Provo, Utah, on May 20, 2020.

The political fallout interfered with the science. On June 15, less than a month after President Trump admitted to taking hydroxychloroquine as a prophylactic, the FDA revoked its EUA.

An Oxford study published in The Lancet showed the drug to be ineffective when given to very sick patients, and even to hasten death. But the study was soon withdrawn because it relied on a questionable company called Surgisphere, which had few employees and limited, unverified data.

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Instead of learning a lesson from the failed Lancet study that more carefully conducted research was essential, both the National Institutes of Health and the World Health Organization have now halted their clinical trials on hydroxychloroquine.

The hope of hydroxychloroquine

Luckily, one bold and innovative group has not stopped. The Henry Ford Health System in Detroit has just released a large retrospective study in which the drug was given very early in the hospitalization. I spoke with its chief academic officer, neurosurgeon Steven Kalkanis.

“We stand behind our recent Henry Ford study where we looked at 2,500 patients and we found that the use of hydroxychloroquine alone cut the death rate in half (from 26% to 13%),” he told me.

According to Dr. Kalkanis, the study screened heavily for those with preexisting conditions, including cardiac disease. He said the key to success is using the drug early in the course of the illness, before significant inflammation occurs.

Rep. Michael Burgess of Texas, a doctor and the senior Republican on the House Subcommittee on Health, told me he is receiving calls from all over the country asking why the drug isn’t in front-line use.

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Unfortunately, the answer is more politics than medicine. I am glad the Henry Ford group is also studying the drug as a preventive in 3,000 health care workers, and I hope the FDA and the NIH reverse their course and continue to participate in these efforts.

I can’t tell you for certain that my father and several of my patients survived COVID-19 because of hydroxychloroquine, but I want science to prove me wrong, not politics. We desperately need treatments for COVID-19, not dogma and divisiveness.

Dr. Marc Siegel, a member of USA TODAY's Board of Contributors and a Fox News medical correspondent, is a clinical professor of medicine and medical director of Doctor Radio at NYU Langone Health. Follow him on Twitter: @DrMarcSiegel

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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: COVID drug Trump championed had promise, but politics hobbled science