Scientists search for coronavirus 'game changer'

Jerry Adler Senior Editor Yahoo News April 14, 2020, 4:44 PM EDT

As many Americans have now heard, President Trump believes that the drug hydroxychloroquine is a “game changer” in the treatment of COVID-19. His endorsement of the antimalarial medication led to an extraordinary surge of interest in an otherwise obscure, preliminary study by a group of French doctors, which in the three weeks since it was published online has been analyzed, dissected and disputed all over the world — including by the administration’s infectious-disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci, to whom it fell to explain that a study involving 36 subjects and lasting less than two weeks didn’t prove very much of anything.

But hydroxychloroquine is only one of a large number of drugs under investigation for COVID-19 therapy. As of Tuesday, a database by the National Institutes of Health listed 524 ongoing and proposed clinical trials related to COVID-19, up from 469 the day before, in laboratories and hospitals from the Pentagon to the Kermanshah University of Medical Sciences in Iran. At least 50 of the trials involve hydroxychloroquine (or a related compound, chloroquine) — in subjects of different ages, with different underlying health conditions, different symptoms or no symptoms at all, at a range of dosages, for varying lengths of time, alone or in combination with other drugs and with specified parameters to measure if the drug is doing any good. One of the most ambitious studies, at the University of Oxford, plans to enroll 40,000 participants in what Fauci has described as the gold standard of research studies, a “double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled trial.” If that doesn’t prove hydroxychloroquine works — or doesn’t work — to treat COVID-19, it’s hard to imagine what will.

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https://www.yahoo.com/news/scientists-search-for-coronavirus-game-changer-204400159.html