Hydroxychloroquine tablets. - John Locher / AP / SIPA

  • On Twitter as on Facebook, a video showing barrels being delivered is widely shared.
  • The videographer filming the scene affirms that it is 70 kilos of chloroquine intended for the Central Pharmacy of the armies, and that this would prove the effectiveness of the treatment against Covid-19 put forward by professor Didier Raoult.
  • The French army confirms at 20 minutes having ordered chloroquine but specifies that it is "a precautionary purchase if ever chloroquine was validated by the health authorities as being useful in the fight against Covid-19" .

Has the French army (which counts at least 1,500 cases of coronavirus) just provided proof of the effectiveness of the controversial treatment of Doctor Didier Raoult consisting in treating Covid-19 with hydroxychloroquine?

This is what many internet users say who share the same video, always accompanied by a similar message: "Chloroquine + masks = for the army !!! I thought it was ineffective… would Macron lie to us ?? YES OF COURSE "," Here is an order for chloroquine intended for the army where are the critics of Didier Raoult? "," Why denigrate chloroquine and the Raoult protocol when we treat the army with it? "

Chloroquine + masks = for the army !!! I thought it was ineffective 🤔🤔 # Macron would lie to us ?? YES OF COURSE pic.twitter.com/FuSWghmxDS

- Alpha in moodless mode! (@ AntiMacron2019) April 23, 2020

On the images in question, we can clearly see several barrels marked "Chloroquine phosphate" while the man filming the sequence says: "70 kilos of barrels of chloroquine, supposedly Raoult, there is a guru, we pretends to be I don't know what! "

"And where is all this going?" Central pharmacy of the armies! We treat the military! So it's weird, it's weird all that! ", He continues by showing the address indicated on the delivery note of this order. The video is in any case provoking lively debate on social networks, some internet users claiming that this order of choloroquine, if it were proven, would in reality aim to provide anti-malaria treatments to soldiers deployed abroad.

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The company in charge of the delivery whose name we see in the video did not respond to our requests before the publication of this article. On the other hand, the Ministry of the Armed Forces, without going back to the video itself, indicates to 20 Minutes "having made, in the context of high supply voltage of pharmaceutical material, a precautionary purchase if ever chloroquine was validated by health authorities as being useful in fighting Covid-19. "

" This is chloroquine salts, not of hydroxychloroquine as such but they are used to make an injectable solution hydroxychloroquine, "says the Ministry of hosts, the central pharmacy of armies is precisely to role "to design and produce drugs, antidotes and other treatments adapted to the risks to which the military could be exposed", as can be read on its website.

Many clinical trials in progress

If chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine are often confused, the two molecules, although similar, are not identical. "Chloroquine is used against malaria, it is found in [the drug] Nivaquine, it is not the same thing as the hydroxychloroquine mentioned in the protocol of Didier Raoult", confirms Mathieu Molimard, pharmacologist and pulmonologist, member of the scientific council of the site of the French Society of Pharmacology and Therapeutics (SFPT).

Hydroxychloroquine - found in the drug Plaquenil - is a derivative of chloroquine. "These are two molecules that are very similar, that have the same mode of action, but that do not have quite the same safety profile for use," explained virologist Bruno Lina on March 23.

And it is indeed hydroxychloroquine which is currently the subject of 18 of the 31 clinical trials currently in progress in France - and of a study on a European scale under the name of Discovery -, whose efficacy against Covid -19 has by definition not yet been proven (but gives rise to heated debates in the medical and pharmacological environment).

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