The World Health Organization (WHO) said Saturday that it suspended studies evaluating AbbVie’s hydroxychloroquine and ABBV,
HIV medicine Kaletra as possible treatments for COVID-19. The WHO has conducted a multiple clinical trial testing a handful of potential treatments in hospitalized patients with COVID-19 since late March. “These interim results show that hydroxychloroquine and lopinavir / ritonavir produce little or no reduction in mortality for patients hospitalized with COVID-19 compared to standard care,” the organization said in a press release. The WHO had previously stopped the hydroxychloroquine arm for safety reasons, restarted it, and then stopped it again; however, there is mounting clinical evidence that hydroxychloroquine, a decades-old antimalarial, is not an effective treatment for seriously ill COVID-19 patients. On June 15, the Food and Drug Administration withdrew its emergency use authorization for hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine, and the National Institutes of Health also suspended their own study of the drug.
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