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Comment by highmastdon | Hacker News Reader

Is any of these studies using Zinc? We know that a lot of people have both Vitamin D and Zinc deficiency. How HCQ works is to transport the Zinc into the cell so that Zinc can stop the RNA replication. (I’m a layman here, but it’s what I’ve managed to understand after deliberate research)

Thus, HCQ without Zinc is like using a bucket but forgetting the water to stop the fire. Just throwing buckets at the fire isn’t gonna work much when there’s no water in the bucket.

Have a look at this [1] studies that shows around a 9% less mortality when treated with Zinc and a even more when treated EARLY with HCQ PLUS Zinc. (Please take a look at the numbers in the last table, it’s very clear that HCQ + Zinc reduces mortality)

[1]: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.02.20080036v...

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I think there are 2 hypothesis for HCQ. One is that it blocks autophagosome-lysosome fusion. The second is that it is a Zinc ionophore, which enables Zinc to enter cells to stop viral replication. It seems that almost all the studies are not using Zinc. Here is a retrospective observational study showing effectiveness of HCQ+Zinc. It is a mystery to me why this second path doesn’t get more attention. Quercetin is also a Zinc ionophore. So Quercetin+Zinc should also be studied.

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.02.20080036v...

This recent research from China suggest another possibility..that it acts as an ACE2 blocker.

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.06.22.164665v1....

The problem is that this crank doctor from France used exactly this treatment (Zinc+HCQ) in a crappy study and proclaimed it as hugely successful.

This was then picked up by a crowd of "right wing deplorables" up to and including the orange man in the white house.

The scientific establishment can not allow this bunch of clowns to turn out right, thus further inquiry is being suppressed.

Call it a conspiracy theory, but that's exactly how human egos have played a role in the history of science.

From the very paper linked by the parent and the parent-parent:

"This was an observational retrospective analysis that could be impacted by confounding variables"; "We also do not have data on the time at which the patients included in the study initiated therapy with hydroxychloroquine, azithromycin, and zinc." "The cohorts were identified based on medications ordered rather than confirmed administration, which may bias findings towards favoring equipoise between the two groups." "In light of these limitations, this study should not be used to guide clinical practice."

So, good reason to have a more clinical trial for testing HCQ + ZINC + Azitromycin vs HCQ alone (vs NO Medicine). But that's something I'm not seeing at the moment, which is a shame.

230 studies looking at Hydroxychloroquine [1]

Only 10 studies looking into HCQ and Zinc [2]

[1]:https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/results?cond=Covid-19&term=hy...

[2]:https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/results?cond=Covid-19&term=hy...

And Hesperidin+Zinc

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