Robin Ferner

I'm Robin Turner.

I'm an honorary consultant physician and clinical pharmacologist in Birmingham and honorary professor of clinical pharmacology at the University of Birmingham.

Well, they're closely related.

Hydroxychloroquine is a derivative of chloroquine, a chemically similar structure, and as far as we know, has very similar actions.

Chloroquine has been used since the Second World War to prevent and to treat malaria, and it's still used to treat some forms of malaria.

Many malaria parasites are now resistant to it.

Hydroxychloroquine is...

used by rheumatologists to damp down inflammation in rheumatoid arthritis.

And I think actually the anti-inflammatory action is secondary in importance.

And the most important logic, insofar as there is logic, is that chloroquine upsets the way in which viruses get into cells and it upsets the way in which they reproduce inside cells.

In COVID-19, the evidence base is really very, very fragile.

There are, in the public domain, the results of four poorly conducted trials, two of which produced positive results and a great deal of excitement, and two of which were negative.

These are very slim pickings.

Well, my colleague Jeff Aronson has looked at up-to-date trial registers

and found over 80 trials which mentioned chloroquine or hydroxychloroquine in the treatment of COVID-19.

The problem is very few of these are well-designed trials which are sufficiently large to give a clear result.

But there are at least three trials in England at the moment, one in general practice, one in hospital short of intensive care, and one in intensive care

which are looking at medicines for treating COVID-19.

And the recovery trial, which is one I'm most familiar with, includes hydroxychloroquine as one of the test agents.

That's already recruited more than 1,000 patients and in due course should give a reliable answer.