Hydroxychloroquine can’t stop COVID-19. It’s time to move on, scientists say
As a frontline doctor working with COVID-19 patients at Columbia University Medical Center in New York City, Neil Schluger had horrific days. “I would come into the ward in the morning to make rounds and say to the intern, ‘How did we do last night?’ And the intern said, ‘Well, I had 10 COVID admissions, and three of them have already died.’ It was like nothing I’ve experienced in 35 years of being a physician,” Schluger says. When he first heard about hydroxychloroquine, he hoped it would work for his patients. He and colleagues prescribed the antimalarial drug for 811 of the 1,446 patients hospitalized at the medical center from March 7 to April 8. But the drug didn’t seem to help, Schluger and colleagues reported May 17 in the New England Journal of Medicine. As a result, “we stopped giving hydroxychloroquine sometime in April,” he says. And yet the numbers of cases and...