An Interview with Professor Didier Raoult  | Virus World | Scoop.it
From www.laprovence.com - March 23, 2020 11:27 AM

Below are excerpts from an interview with Dr. Didier Raoult, who published the first report of a small clinical trial with results showing clinical benefit of a combination therapy of hydroxychloroquine together with azithromycin.

 

...Despite the echo given to the political and medical distrust regarding his clinical trial, the head of the IHU is convinced of the relevance of hydroxychloroquine to treat patients with Covid-19. Despite the media psychosis and his daily death toll, he repeats: we are more likely to die from something other than "Chinese coronavirus". 

24 patients are followed in the clinical trial, how many people have been treated since ...
Pr Didier Raoult:  We have treated others, but I won't tell you how many. I will first notify the department.

After six days of treatment, the viral load of 75% of the patients is negative, are they cured?

 

Pr Didier Raoult:  They are cured of the virus. But if you have lung damage, it won't go away in three days. We also don't know at the moment whether  if once cured, you can fall ill again, this has not been described by the Chinese who are two months ahead of us.

What about the 25% who are still positive? Does their situation worsen as we say around the 7th and 8th days?

 

Pr Didier Raoult:  We have not had any aggravation in the cases treated but we do not see people in serious condition. For the moment, serious cases are those that are neither detected nor treated and arrive with very serious respiratory failure. They go straight to resuscitation and they will die there. If we screen and treat people early, there is  a better chance of saving them than if we treat them 48 hours before the terminal phase.

 

Your strategy since the beginning of the epidemic is to mobilize all the IHU to make massive screening, why, it was not a national strategy from the beginning?

 

Pr Didier Raoult:  It's not my strategy, it's common sense. I do not know why it is not a national strategy, it is a political choice. Me, I do my duty, period. I do what I have to do, I play my score in a room. But I I who invented the theater, nor the text. I am the only one with a classic thought on infectious diseases when everyone is losing their nerves ...

 

What about the side effects of treatment with hydroxychloroquine?

 

Pr Didier Raoult:  What people say about side effects is simply delusional. These are people who haven't opened a medical book in years. Over a billion people have taken it, people who suffer from lupus take it for decades ... I know these drugs very well, I have treated 4,000 people with Plaqenil for 20 years. It's not me who's weird, it's people who are ignorant. I'm not going to be told the toxicity of this drug.

 

(Translated from French)