I'm an agnostic on chloroquine, but it was indeed strange that so many serious side effects were found when the drug has been used so widely for so long.
I wonder if the doctors could have been seeing cardiac/clotting problems and damage to organs and mistakenly attributing it to the chloroquine? Early on those risks were not anticipated, but we now know they are common in serious cases. Normally the risk of this should be minimized when doing a randomized trial, but I imagine misinterpretations can happen when the disease isn't yet well understood.
It was not used so widely. It was discovered in the 1930s, but ignored for a decade because it was assumed too toxic for humans. It got use in the 1940s. Not at lot of really old medicines have stood the test of time, for example TCA antidepressants and first generation antipsychotics have fallen nearly completely out of use now.
But today (pre-corona) only a few hundred tons are produced yearly. Generally it is used briefly, as a last resort. Even the well-tolerated patients are monitored closely for eye damage and cardiac issues. These issues were known beforehand.
The study quoted in post 1344 about cardiac damage is from 2018.. years before this craziness set in.
The trouble with cytokine modulators and auto-immune treatments generally is side effects, immuno-suppression or cardiotoxic or genotoxic effects. It's not clear HCQ could even be a good inspiration for new medicines. It could be that something like button mushrooms, turmeric and quercetin are much safer and almost as helpful.
Edited by gamesguru, 30 April 2020 - 02:50 PM.