WHO on Monday suspended the hydroxychloroquine arm of a global trial on COVID19, India reiterated its faith in the drug on Tuesday
A day after the World health Organisation decided to suspend a global trial involving hydroxychloroquine, India reiterated its faith in the drug. There are side-effects, top officials said, but under proper supervision, the benefits far outweigh the risks of using it for COVID19 prophylaxis.
“COVID is an evolving field don’t know what works, what doesn’t. A lot of repurposing being done for treatment and prophylaxis. Chloroquine old antimalarial drug in use for 100 years. HCQ is even safer. The biological plausibility was supporting it is possibly an anti viral drug. We had conducted some in vitro studies and there was data also published in nature etc that show anti viral activity. We found similar properties in vitro. It was very popular American govt started using it, got fastback approval,” said Dr Balram Bhargava, secretary, department of health research. He is also director general of the Indian Council of Medical Research.
On Monday WHO suspended the HCQ arm of its multi country Solidarity Trial pending a review of the evidence over the next few weeks. India uses the drug for prophylaxis and for treatment of COVID19 – the latter along with the antibiotic azithromycin.
“Looking at risk benefit we found that possibly we should not deny our frontline or healthcare workers dealing with COVID. At the same time we said use of PPE should be continued”
“We had thought it may be a useful drug for prophylaxis based on in vitro data, bio plausibility and availability and safety of the drug. We had recommended it for empiric use under strict supervision sometime back. During these six weeks we got some data I India and they were mainly observational studies, some were case control studies at AIIMS and ICMR and three public hospitals in Delhi. We looked at data from both kinds of studies and found that it may be working. We also found no major side effects except nausea and some palpitation occasionally,” Dr Bhargava said. He added that the findings from the studies were factored into the advisory last week that expanded the scope of preventive use of hydroxychloroquine to include all frontline workers.
“In the advisory we have written for prophylaxis it should be continued because there is no harm and benefit may be there/ Secondly we found side effects so said it should be taken with food. Third was we need to do one ECG during use of the drug. We expanded recommendations from healthcare to frontline workers for eight weeks or beyond once there is an ECG available and it is safe. Looking at risk benefit we found that possibly we should not deny our frontline or healthcare workers dealing with COVID. At the same time we said use of PPE should be continued,” he said.
