Dr. Stephen Smith on effectiveness of hydroxychloroquine: 'I think this is the beginning of the end of the pandemic'
Dr. Stephen Smith on effectiveness of hydroxychloroquine: 'I think this is the beginning of the end of the pandemic'
Dr. Stephen Smith, founder of The Smith Center for Infectious Diseases and Urban Health, said on “The Ingraham Angle” on Wednesday night that he is optimistic about the use of antimalarial medications and antibiotics to treat COVID-19 patients calling it a
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Dr. Stephen Smith, founder of The Smith Center for Infectious Diseases and Urban Health, said on “The Ingraham Angle” on Wednesday night that he is optimistic about the use of antimalarial medications and antibiotics to treat COVID-19 patients, calling it “a game-changer.”
“I think this is the beginning of the end of the pandemic. I’m very serious,” Smith, an infectious disease specialist, told host Laura Ingraham.
Smith, who is treating 72 COVID-19 patients, said that he has been treating "everybody with hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin [an antibiotic]. We’ve been doing so for a while.”
He pointed out that not a single COVID-19 patient of his that has been on the hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin regimen for five days or more has had to be intubated.
“We think it's real,” Dr. Oz said on Thursday.
He then went on to explain what the study, which looked at 62 patients, showed. He noted that half of the patients got the traditional therapy being offered in China and the other half got the traditional therapy plus hydroxychloroquine.
“In terms of symptoms, their temperatures, their fevers broke instead of three days, which is the norm over there on this treatment, they got two days,” Dr. Oz said.
He added that “in terms of coughing, the other big symptom you have, again it takes a little over three days oftentimes for that to go away and that was dropped at two days.”
Dr. Oz then pointed out the part that “really caught my attention.”
“They did CT scans of the chest in all the patients. All the patients had pneumonia when they started. Over the course of the five-day treatment with the hydroxychloroquine and 55 percent of the control population where they just got the normal therapy there was resolve and resolution of the pneumonia in 81 percent of the patients on the hydroxychloroquine, there was improvement in the lung's images,” he pointed out.
Dr. Oz noted that these results are “statistically significant.”
A New York Times article published on Wednesday also referenced the Chinese study Dr. Oz had referred to on “Fox and Friends.”
The article, which cited doctors in China, titled “Malaria Drug Helps Virus Patients Improve, in Small Study,” highlighted the fact that hydroxychloroquine “helped to speed the recovery of a small number of patients who were mildly ill from the coronavirus.”
“Cough, fever and pneumonia went away faster, and the disease seemed less likely to turn severe in people who received hydroxychloroquine than in a comparison group not given the drug,” the article said. “The authors of the report said that the medication was promising, but that more research was needed to clarify how it might work in treating coronavirus disease and to determine the best way to use it.”
Dr. Mehmet Oz
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Can hydroxychloroquine prevent COVID-19? Study aims to find answers
Currently, there is no known scientific cure for the conronavirus pandemic ravaging the globe, but one potential solution, antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine, has received increased attention in recent weeks. A new study aims to confirm whether that atte
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Dr. Stephen Smith on effectiveness of hydroxychloroquine: 'I think this is the beginning of the end of the pandemic'
Dr. Stephen Smith, founder of The Smith Center for Infectious Diseases and Urban Health, said on “The Ingraham Angle” on Wednesday night that he is optimistic about the use of antimalarial medications and antibiotics to treat COVID-19 patients calling it a
www.foxnews.com