Antimalarial drugs put to the test for COVID-19

Over 200,000 people worldwide could receive the old antimalarial drugs chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine across more than 130 clinical trials designed to treat or prevent COVID-19, according to the US clinical trials database. A small study in March suggested that hydroxychloroquine plus the antibiotic azithromycin helped people with COVID-19 recover faster. President Donald J. Trump touted hydroxychloroquine’s potential in the following weeks, spurring huge demand for the drug. While some doctors prescribed it without proof, others scrambled to construct clinical studies to assess the drug’s efficacy. The earliest results are discouraging. A team of investigators in Brazil gave chloroquine to 81 hospitalized patients; 32% of those who received high doses died, compared with 15% who received the low dose (medRxiv 2020, DOI: 10.1101/2020.04.07.20056424). Separately, data analyzed from 368 people with COVID-19 at hospitals run by the US Veterans Health Administration revealed that 28% who received hydroxychloroquine and 22% who got that