Do Hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin Work?
This week marks five years since March 13, 2020, the day President Donald Trump declared a national state of emergency over the novel coronavirus outbreak. The White House issued The President’s Coronavirus Guidelines for America three days later. Among other things, the guidelines advised Americans to avoid bars, restaurants, shopping trips, and social visits. They also said that governors in states with evidence of community transmission should close schools, bars, restaurants, food courts, gyms, and other indoor and outdoor venues.
Sticking to recent peer-reviewed science, and setting aside the political question of what the government should do with the information, what do we know now about the ways people tried to protect themselves from the virus? This week, we’re looking at several measures—face masking, the vaccines—as well as the matter of how many Americans died of COVID-19 infections. Yesterday, we tackled face coverings. Today, let’s probe what researchers have learned about the efficacy of hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin in treating COVID-19.
Six days after declaring a national emergency in 2020, Trump on March 19 hailed using the antimalaria compounds chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine as a potential “game changer” in the treatment of COVID-19. Trump’s enthusiasm for the compounds was likely stoked, in part, by a guest earlier that week on Fox News claiming that hydroxychloroquine had a “100 percent cure rate against coronavirus.” The guest was citing the unpublished results of a small nonrandomized study by a team led by French researcher Didier Raoult.
Feeling pressured by the president, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued an emergency use authorization (EUA) for chloroquine/hydroxychloroquine on March 28 for the treatment of COVID-19.
In early April 2020, a team of Australian researchers reported that the antiparasitic compound ivermectin killed COVID-19 viruses in infected cells in a petri dish. During the pandemic in the U.S. the use of hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin doubled and increased by tenfold, respectively, from January 30, 2020, to May 11, 2023, according to a 2025 Health Affairs analysis.
Citing emerging scientific data, the FDA on June 15, 2020, revoked its EUA after determining that chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine were unlikely to be effective in treating COVID-19. Again, the whiplash of confusing and contradictory claims and public health decisions about the efficacy of the compounds for treating COVID-19 ended up politicizing the issue.
Since 2020, there have been thousands of studies of the compounds. Google Scholar finds 32,800 and 15,800 citations of COVID-19 and hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin, respectively. Many initial studies came to contrary conclusions about their efficacy in treating COVID-19. So five years after the national emergency was declared, what have researchers determined?
Hydroxychloroquine
A September 2024 article in the journal Biomedicines reviewing the findings of clinical trials for ivermectin and chloroquine/hydroxychloroquine reported that “most
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