WATCH: Doctor on Joe Rogan says chloroquine shows promise, needs 'more testing'

Dr. Peter Hotez, M.D., Ph.D. is Dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine and Professor of Pediatrics and Molecular Virology & Microbiology at Baylor College of Medicine and recently he appeared as a guest on the Joe Rogan Experience to discuss the coronavirus pandemic and possible vaccines.

The interview, which was conducted via Skype as social distancing measures are still in place, was an interesting look into what lies ahead for the public when it comes to the pandemic. Rogan was keen to ask the Dr. Hortez about potential treatments, including the hydroxychloroquine.

Joe Rogan asked, "let’s talk about treatments that are being considered. We know that Z-Pak’s are one of them, and chloroquine. Can you explain that and what went horribly wrong with the couple that took the wrong kind of chloroquine and it turned out to be a koi pond cleaner?"

Rogan was referring to a story that recently went viral about a couple who took hydroxychloroquine in an attempt to cure their sickness after contracting COVID-19 which resulted in the man dying and his wife becoming terribly ill. They ingested fish food which contained chloroquine phosphate.

Dr. Hotez replied, "This is a medicine that’s used for malaria. It’s an anti-malarial drug. It’s been around for decades. In fact, the World Health Organization had in the 1960s proposed [it as] an elimination strategy for malaria to treat everybody with chloroquine until we had chloroquine resistance and that derailed that.
But in some parts of the world, it’s still works as an anti-malarial drug. It’s also used as an anti-inflammatory drug for the tree treatment of lupus and other autoimmune diseases."

"You can make a bucket of it. It’s cheap. We know the safety profile. We know it can cause arrhythmias in some patient and other toxicities, but it generally has a pretty good safety profile. We know that this drug can block the replication of the virus in the test tube, so it inhibits the virus in what we call it, in vitro in the test tube. Second, we know this drug reduces inflammation and that’s nice because one of the things you get with COVID-19 pneumonia is you not only get the virus infection in the lung, you got a lot of inflammation, so it checks a couple of boxes in terms of why it’s attractive to look at it."

Dr. Hotez then tells Rogan about a colleague of his in Marseille, France, who, "did a small study showing that it worked in COVID patients. And what he did was he combined hydroxychloroquine with the Z-Pak, the Zithromycin drug and found that there’s an effect. The problem was that it was a very tiny study and so people put those three things together and all of a sudden said we’ve got the miracle cure. I’m not sure that’s going to turn out to be the case."

"I mean we really need to do large studies to show that it really works. And the reason I’m holding back is nothing to do with Dr. Professor O is a really important scientists, but it’s a small study. We were there about a decade ago with influenza that this hydroxychloroquine also inhibited the influenza virus in the test tube. But then it didn’t pan out in larger clinical studies.

"So I think we have to be really careful and don’t be too quick to say, 'Okay, this is going to be it.' We’re not even close to that yet, but we’ll know in the next few weeks because we’re working hard to scale up clinical trials looking at that medicine."

"So the two components are a lot of virus causing direct damage and then the host all the inflammatory response. And that’s one of the reasons why when I heard about Hydroxychloroquine I had some enthusiasm, because it can maybe suppress the inflammatory component. Whether it clinically has the ability to make a difference, I just think the jury is still out yet. But so you’ve got those two things going on."

For the full podcast, watch below.