Gold Dragon
Well-Known Member
Ok, now tell that to the hundreds of millions of white and black africans (maybe close to a billion people over decades) who have taken this drug prophylactically for malaria prevention including nursing mothers infants and children for many decades and never heard a peep about how it would kill you.
https://www.cdc.gov/malaria/resources/pdf/fsp/drugs/Hydroxychloroquine.pdf
CDC says this
Hydroxychloroquine can be prescribed to adults
and children of all ages. It can also be safely taken by
pregnant women and nursing mothers.
The risks of hydroxychloroquine, including the cardiac arrythmia have been known for decades. Those risk do not apply to everyone, they are rare but they are still there. In the CDC article, it is under the drug interactions section and not specifically stated because this is more an issue for the doctor to think about rather than the patient. The risks of the arrythmia can be assessed by looking at the individual patient history and their existing medications. Doing an ECG will also assess risk further. Even when everything looks fine to go ahead, it is still possible that the arrythmia will occur, just very unlikely.
Another rare but serious risk is blindness which seems to be associated with longer term use (like would be the case with prophylactic use) and less of a risk in short term use (like in treatment situations). Again if is rare but significant enough that we monitor patients on long term therapy. The CDC article you quoted uses a 5 year mark to start screening for this which is reasonable but that doesn’t mean it can’t happen earlier, just that it is super unlikely.
But when you apply a drug outside the trial setting to large numbers of people before it is shown to have proven benefit, you run the risk causing more harm than good.