Could existing drugs help combat COVID-19?

Auckland City Hospital is one of a number of hospitals in New Zealand and Australia hoping to recruit patients into two clinical studies which will help to determine whether either an anti-malaria medicine or an anti-HIV medicine will help patients with COVID-19 to recover.

Patients admitted to hospital, either in a medical ward if their illness is not severe, or an intensive care department if their illness is severe, will be offered the opportunity to participate in the studies.

If patients or their family provide consent, they will be randomly allocated to treatment with hydroxychloroquine (an anti-malaria medicine), or with Kaletra (an anti-HIV medicine), or with a combination of both hydroxychloroquine and Kaletra, or with a placebo.

Neither the patients, nor their family, nor the medical team caring for the patients, will know which of the four possible treatments the patients are receiving. It is what is called a double-blind study, which allows the effects, potentially beneficial, or harmful, to be evaluated without any bias affecting the evaluation of the effect of each treatment on patients’ outcomes.

It is very unlikely that patients who are not participating in these studies will be offered these medicines because their medical teams will not know, until this and other similar trials are completed, whether the medicines are helpful, harmful or have no discernible benefit or harm.