I can't believe the media has been downplaying chloroquine+ treatment since Trump tweeted about it. This medicine has shown nothing but promise for months now, since the first reports out of China.
Zelenko wrote (above) that he had:
"669 PATIENTS SEEN IN MY MONROE, NY practice with either test proven or clinically diagnosed corona infection"
That "test proven" part is easy to miss.
Zelenko's study is not a randomized controlled double-blind study but, at 699 patients so far, it is definitely statistically significant.
It will be months, if not years, and quite possibly never before a controlled experiment occurs. Such an experiment could be deemed medically unethical because it withheld a highly-successful treatment from the control group:
"More than one way to measure":
I think you missed out that Zelenko's protocol is partially a result of the ideas presented in a paper "Chloroquine Is a Zinc Ionophore:"
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4182877/
In other words, one of Zelenko's ideas was
1)zinc stops the virus and
2) chloroquine allows zinc to much more easily enter the cell.
Previous studies AFAIK used chloroquine alone, not zinc sulfate + chloroquine+azithromycin.
You can read Zelenko's study years from now _if_ he submits for publication, _after_ the peer review process is completed and the drafts _checked_ for errors and the paper goes to a publisher and is _published_ on the Internet or is mailed to your local university which may or may not have the publication.
Chloroquine is generally safe and well tolerated. And it is not hard to properly dose. People take it prophylactically when traveling to certain countries with non resistent malaria. The fact that some idiot killed himself should not be enough to limit our own rights to knowledge and potentially self treatment during a crisis where the government has unquestionably failed.
It was probably the right chemical, as far as I can tell there isn't an aquarium specific formulation, Chloroquine Phosphate is Chloroquine Phosphate. You could just as easily overdose on the prescription if you downed a handful of pills.
I'm upset they didn't report this correctly because now people can still die from an overdose and people who might have had access to the aquarium chemical might have saved themselves with proper dosage.
Taking a spoonful of that stuff is always a very bad idea.
Even if one could find "pure" Chloroquine Phosphate without all the other stuff, Chloroquine Phosphate is not the same as Chloroquine Phosphate. You can charge or remove electrons and still call it Chloroquine Phosphate, you can put it into different crystal formations, and I am probably forgetting other tricks that exist in chemistry to completely alter the behavior of a drug.