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COVID-19 and Hydroxychloroquine — the Evidence Against
By Nana Dadzie Ghansah
Even though the COVID-19 pandemic has ignited amazing biomedical research into novel therapies, vaccines, and immune pathways, one drug seems to continuously steal the show and distract from all the great work that is being done.
Hydroxychloroquine!
So is Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) an effective prophylactic or even decent treatment option for managing COVID-19? To answer that, let’s look at the concept of the clinical evidence.
Besides maybe a few holdouts, the practice of medicine since the 1990s has mostly become evidence-based. Treatments are not based on gut-feelings and age-old traditions but data and science. Ever since the spring of 1990, when a McMasters University (Ontario, Canada) internist called Gordon Guyatt introduced the term “Evidence-Based Medicine” (1), that name now best describes how medicine is practiced.
Not all medical practices are still buttressed by reliable evidence, and the evidence available is not always of the same quality. Hence the need to rank that evidence. Canadians again did the initial work on that(2). At the moment, there is broad agreement among clinicians and researchers about how to rate each level of evidence used in clinical decision making and evaluating treatment options.
