An anti-malaria drug that doctors hoped would work against COVID-19, and that President Donald Trump championed and said he took himself, has failed to show substantial benefit in a second University of Minnesota trial.
U researchers compared 491 people with early symptoms of COVID-19 — with one group taking hydroxychloroquine for five days and the other taking a non-medicating placebo — and found no measurable differences in their outcomes.
Death rates of 0.4% were identical in the groups. Hospitalizations and persistent symptoms over 14 days were slightly more common in the placebo group, but not by a significant margin. Mostly mild side effects such as nausea were reported by 43% of patients taking the drug vs. 22% taking placebos.
The results were hardly what U researchers hoped for in March when they launched one of the world's first clinical trials of any drug for COVID-19, an infectious disease caused by a novel coronavirus.
"This is definitely not what we thought was going to happen," said Dr. David Boulware, a leader of the trial and a U infectious disease physician.
No known treatments for COVID-19 existed at the time — and few have been proven even now — but Boulware and colleagues were optimistic because hydroxychloroquine was cheap and widely available and affected the very same ACE-2 receptors that the virus attacks on cells.
The study adds to a volume of evidence that discourages the use of hydroxychloroquine to treat COVID-19 — including the first trial result that the U published in the New England Journal of Medicine last month that showed that the drug offered no protection for people who likely had been exposed to the virus and were at risk for infection.
The results leave the world thin on proven treatments for COVID-19, which to date has been confirmed in Minnesota in 44,347 cases and 1,526 deaths. That includes 611 cases and eight deaths reported Thursday by the Health Department.