On April 1st 2020, the Chief Medical Officers of England, Scotland, Wales and N. Ireland, and the National Medical Director Stephen Powis signed a message sent to their NHS colleagues to ask that every effort was made to enroll COVID-19 patients in the national priority clinical trials.

By David James

Those trials were:

PRINCIPLE (higher risk patients in primary care trial).
RECOVERY (in hospital trial)
REMAP-CAP (critically ill patient trial)

Hydroxychloroquine was one of the drugs being trialled. In the RECOVERY Trial and the REMAP-CAP Trial they used an extremely high and potentially lethal dose: 800 mg at 0 and 6 hours followed by 400 mg at 12 hours and then every 12 hours for up to nine additional days. A patient was therefore given 2,400 mg in the first 24 hours of treatment.

According to David Jayne, professor of clinical autoimmunity at Cambridge University:

“Hydroxychloroquine overdose is associated with cardiovascular, neurological, and other toxicities, occurring with doses over 1500 mg, and higher doses are associated with fatality.”

In an article for the BMJ found here co-head of the Recovery Trial Martin Landray explained:

“The dose comes from modelling by Nick White, professor of tropical medicine at the University of Oxford, and his team, who have extensive experience with this drug.”

Sir Nicholas White was involved in the WHO’s “Informal consultation on the potential role of chloroquine in the clinical management of COVID 19 infection” on March 13th. Also present were 5 “Experts” affiliated with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The WHO’s SOLIDARITY Trial used the same dose for hydroxychloroquine as the RECOVERY & REMAP-CAP Trials.

Chinese scientists had already recommended a much lower and safer dose on March 9th 2020:

“a loading dose of 400 mg twice daily of hydroxychloroquine sulfate given orally, followed by a maintenance dose of 200 mg given twice daily for 4 days is recommended for SARS-CoV-2 infection”

The RECOVERY trial enrolled it’s first patient on March 19th (see from 9th minute onwards):

The REMAP-CAP Trial was a global trial that had a very large number of participating sites in England:

https://www.remapcap.org/participating-sites

The largest clusters of participating sites for the REMAP-CAP trial were in London, the West Midlands and the North West. According to the Financial Times these regions saw the largest increases in excess deaths in Spring 2020:

There is a genetic disorder known as G6PD deficiency. G6PDd is prevalent in parts of the world where malaria is endemic such as Sub-Saharan Africa. Hydroxychloroquine is a more dangerous drug for people with G6PDd.

The German physician Wolfgang Wodarg wrote to the British Medical Journal offering an explanation for the overrepresentation of ethnic minorities among patients and medical staff in COVID-19 death statistics:

“I think one of the possible reasons for more Covid-19 victims among patients and medical staff with ancestors from malaria countries could be the widespread use of chloroquine (cq) and hydroxychloroquine (hcq) for therapy and for prophylactic indications with patients with a G6PD-deficiency.”

“Black people four times more likely to die from Covid-19, ONS finds”

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/07/black-people-four-times-more-likely-to-die-from-covid-19-ons-finds 

In an interview with Vinay Prasad one of the world’s top epidemiologists John Ioannidis stated the following about the mistakes made in the “First Wave”:

“… probably we killed about 100,000 people just with hydroxychloroquine as treatment globally”

(See 1 hour 37 minutes onwards)

Torsten Engelbrecht and Claus Köhnlein, MD (Co-Authors of the book “Virus Mania”) believe it could have been much higher:

The first official COVID-19 death was Peter Attwood in January 2020. He was admitted to hospital with a bad cough on January 7th. The virus – said to be more transmissible and more lethal than the flu – was therefore in the UK as far back as December if not earlier.

There were no excess deaths in the UK in January or February. Excess deaths only began in mid-late March coinciding with:

1. The implementation of Lockdown
2. The discharging of patients (who hadn’t fully recovered) out of hospitals (where you’re most likely to pick up an infection) into care homes (where the most vulnerable people are)
3. The trials in which extremely high and potentially lethal doses of hydroxychloroquine were being administered