"The Key to Defeating COVID-19 Already Exists. We Need to Start Using It
Harvey A. Risch, MD, PhD , Professor of Epidemiology, Yale School of Public Health
On 7/23/20 at 7:00 AM EDT"
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Third, concerns have been raised by the FDA and others about risks of cardiac arrhythmia, especially when hydroxychloroquine is given in combination with azithromycin. The FDA based its comments on data in its FDA Adverse Event Reporting System. This reporting system captured up to a thousand cases of arrhythmias attributed to hydroxychloroquine use. In fact, the number is likely higher than that, since the reporting system, which requires physicians or patients to initiate contact with the FDA, appreciably undercounts drug side effects.
But what the FDA did not announce is that these adverse events were generated from tens of millions of patient uses of hydroxychloroquine for long periods of time, often for the chronic treatment of lupus or rheumatoid arthritis. Even if the true rates of arrhythmia are ten-fold higher than those reported, the harms would be minuscule compared to the mortality occurring right now in inadequately treated high-risk COVID-19 patients. This fact is proven by an Oxford University study of more than 320,000 older patients taking both hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin, who
had arrhythmia excess death rates of less than 9/100,000 users, as I discuss in my May 27 paper cited above.
A new paper in the American Journal of Medicine by established cardiologists around the world fully agrees with this."
By way of comparison, the death rate among elderly and high risk patients from untreated COVID-19, is about 15,000/100,000.
https://www.covid-19forum.org/index.php?topic=168.0"If there are Q-T interval concerns, doxycycline can be substituted for azithromycin as it has activity against RNA viruses without any cardiac effects."
https://www.covid-19forum.org/index.php?topic=137.0
