- Taking hydroxychloroquine shortly after being exposed to COVID-19 does not help prevent infection in a statistically meaningful way, scientists reported Wednesday following a clinical trial.
Taking hydroxychloroquine shortly after being exposed to COVID-19 does not help prevent infection in a statistically meaningful way, scientists reported Wednesday following a clinical trial.
The medicine has been touted by US President Donald Trump, who has said he used it as a prophylaxis against the novel coronavirus.
But an experiment involving 821 people across the United States and Canada showed it did not work significantly better than a placebo for this purpose.
The study was led by a team at the University of Minnesota, and their paper was published in the New England Journal of Medicine.
Researchers enrolled adults who had come into contact with someone who had a confirmed case of COVID-19 for more than 10 minutes at a distance of six feet (about two meters) or less.
The majority of them – 719 – were deemed to have had “high-risk” exposure because they wore neither a face mask nor an eye shield at the time, while the rest were “moderate-risk” because they covered their face but did not have goggles.
