The New Yorker:

As the number of people who are infected with, hospitalized for, and die from SARS-CoV-2 escalates each day, the world is increasingly desperate for an effective treatment. More than a hundred and fifty hospital workers in Boston, where I live and work, have contracted the virus, and I have relatives in New York and New Jersey who are hospitalized and fighting for their lives. A potential immediate solution, based on supposedly positive results from clinical studies in Marseille, France, which President Trump touted as a possible “game changer,” is a cocktail of an antimalarial and an antibiotic, hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin. On Saturday, the F.D.A. approved hydroxychloroquine and a related medication, chloroquine, for emergency use. Advocates for the cocktail argue that desperate diseases require desperate measures. But a study published on Tuesday, led by Jean-Michel Molina, an infectious-diseases expert at Hôpital Saint-Louis, in Paris, reports that, when prescribed in the same regimen as was followed in Marseille, the cocktail shows no benefit. This should give us serious pause before we rush into widespread use of prescription medications for SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19. These drugs can have serious side effects, particularly in people most vulnerable to the virus: the elderly and those with heart problems.

As a physician who has worked on H.I.V./AIDS in the laboratory and at the bedside since the nineteen-eighties, I have become attuned to the value both of taking risks in the face of a devastating disease and of holding fast to solid science. (Molina worked with me on this research three decades ago.) I’ve learned that false hope is a powerful lure, which in the moment gives a welcome sense of respite and comfort but ultimately can do real harm. In the late eighties, studies in the test tube showed that what was called Compound Q, extracted from a Chinese cucumber plant, killed H.I.V. Some patients in California rushed to take it; the lucky ones suffered no side effects, while others experienced severe toxicity, and several died. In the end, the treatment was deemed ineffective and abandoned; it stands as an example of how what happens in the lab is often distant and distinct from what happens in our bodies.

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