More Anecdotal Evidence That Chloroquinine Is Effective; The FDA is to Blame For the Six Weeks of Delay in Coronavirus Testing

Actor Dae Kim from Lost got the Chinese flu, and says that chloroquinine was a major factor in his quick recovery.

"I'm happy to report that my progress has continued and I feel practically back to normal," Kim said. A bit later he explained that one of the first questions he was asked when he announced his illness was "What medicines did you take?" After giving a brief disclaimer that his is not a doctor, Kim said he was prescribed a cocktail of drugs including tamiflu, the antibiotic Azithromycin, an inhaler to prevent inflammation, and hydroxychloroquine.

"And here’s what I consider to be the secret weapon: hydroxychloroquine," Kim said. He continued, "This is a common anti-malarial drug that has been used with great success in Korea in their fight against the coronavirus. And yes, this is the drug that the president mentioned the other day. It is also the drug that Dr. Anthony Fauci cautioned us about.

"He said that evidence that the drug is promising is anecdotal and that is correct. It means it wasn’t studied and is only based on personal accounts. Well add my name to those personal accounts because I am feeling better."

It's just an anecdote: His immune system might have been on the verge of beating the drug without chloroquinine.

In the same category is this woman's quick recovery.

She had been ill since March 8, toughing it out through fatigue, a cough and fevers that brought on vicious chills for five evenings straight.

Finally, on March 15, she went to an urgent care center and, on March 16, to an emergency room....

"I couldn’t breathe," she said.
...

To that point, Novins had been a pneumonia patient for three days, treated mainly with antibiotics. But within an hour, a new drug was added to her med list: hydroxychloroquine, a decades-old malaria-turned-autoimmune drug, also called by its brand name Plaquenil...

Novins' responded to the treatment. She was better, though surely not well, the next day.

"The fever," which was still spiking when she was on other meds, "is now gone, which is fantastic," she said on Saturday March 21, coughing at times but able to speak.

They note the French study which prompted all this optimism consisted of only 20 people given the chrloroquinine/azrithromycin combination. (Another 20, I think, served as a control group who were not given that combination.)

That's obviously a small sample, but still, as anecdotes accumulate they do become data.

Meanwhile, it turns out that Orange Man Bad was not responsible for the delay in coronavirus testing.

The FDA refused to expedite approvals for the test, despite a national health emergency having been declared.

posted by Ace at 06:21 PM

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