As an epidemiologist, I believe that America has been profoundly ill-served by the contribution of its public health authorities to the debate on the efficacy of treating vulnerable COVID-19 patients with hydroxychloroquine (HCQ). It is a debate with a direct link to whether America’s schools should reopen next month. Even those who reject the World Health Organization’s misleading comparison of COVID-19 with the horrendous 1918 Spanish flu pandemic and its presumption that humans lack any immunity against SARS-CoV-2 would welcome improvements in our ability to treat patients with COVID-19, in order to reduce the risk in reopening schools.
Distinguished Yale epidemiologist Harvey Risch has written extensively on the meticulous research demonstrating the efficacy of the early administration of HCQ in combination with the antibiotic azithromycin and zinc. Conclusions from this research are based on criteria developed by British epidemiologist Sir Bradford Hill and Sir Richard Doll, two of the first scientists to discover the causal link between tobacco smoking and lung cancer, criteria that laid the foundations of modern epidemiology and that are used to this day to determine whether an observed association can be ascribed to causation.
Far from exploring this potential breakthrough in the treatment of COVID-19, the National Institutes of Health and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) were both dismissive, condemning early outpatient treatment with the HCQ triple therapy as ineffective and dangerous. Instead, these agencies state that the only permissible way to determine its efficacy and safety is with randomized clinical trials (RCTs). Virologist Steven Hatfill has described a circle of self-reinforcing media commentary based on flawed, fraudulent, and withdrawn studies and the FDA’s mistaken decision to withdraw its HCQ Emergency Use Authorization, costing thousands of American lives.
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