Amid hydroxychloroquine hopes, lupus patients face shortages

A second potential issue: Patients who refused the treatment or had exclusion criteria served as controls. “It’s hard for me to describe just how problematic this is,” said Putman in his podcast. Ideally patients would be randomly assigned to one of the two treatment groups, said Putman. Patients with exclusion criteria — those unable to take the medication — are not the same as patients who are able to take it, he says. And the same is true for patients who refuse a drug vs. those who don’t.

Whether these and other potential problems with the research will prove salient in coming weeks and months is impossible to know — and most researchers concede that even amid lingering uncertainties, time is of the essence in the frantic hunt to find ways to slow the fast-moving Covid-19 pandemic. “A lot of this,” Kim said, “is the rush of trying to get something out.” On Friday, the University of Minnesota announced the launch of a 1,500-person trial aimed at further exploring the efficacy of hydroxychloroquine against SARS-CoV-2. And drug makers Novartis, Mylan, and Teva announced last week that they were fast-tracking production, with additional plans to donate hundreds of millions of tablets to hospitals around the country to help combat Covid-19 infections.

Still, reports of shortages are mounting. “It’s gone. It’s not in the pharmacy now,” a physician in Queens told The Washington Post on Friday. The doctor admitted taking the drug himself in the hope of staving off infection, and that he’d prescribed it to 30 patients as a prophylactic.

These sorts of fast-multiplying, ad hoc transactions, are what worry lupus patients like Julie Powers. For now, she says she has enough hydroxychloroquine to last 90 days, and she added that her pharmacist in the Washington, D.C. area is currently hiding the medicine to be sure her regular lupus patients can get their prescriptions refilled.

Powers sounds almost amazed when she describes what that means to her: “I can walk outside,” she said, “and I can live.”

Sara Talpos is a senior editor at Undark and a freelance writer whose recent work has been published in Science, Mosaic, and the Kenyon Review’s special issue on science writing.

Disclosure: The author’s spouse is a rheumatologist at Michigan Medicine.

UPDATES: This story has been updated to clarify Alfred Kim’s view on several patients who dropped out of a small French study on the efficacy of using hydroxychloroquine to treat Covid-19 cases. The piece was also edited to include information noting that one state pharmacy board is now taking steps to curtail prescriptions of hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine for Covid-19 prophylaxis.

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