Hydroxychloroquine only works when used in combination with Zinc, Dr. Anthony Cardillo says on ABC News

A lot has been said about anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine and how it has successfully been used to treat coronavirus patients. However, many doctors are now saying hydroxychloroquine alone does not work. It only works when used in combination with Zinc. Dr. Anthony Cardillo, CEO of Mend Urgent Care, says that “Every patient I’ve prescribed it to has been very, very ill and within 8 to 12 hours, they were basically symptom-free.”

In one of his videos, Dr. Vladimir Zelenko, a board-certified family practitioner in New York, explained that it is Zinc that actually helps slows or decelerates the viral replication within the cell. But on its own, Zinc cannot penetrate the cell without the help of hydroxychloroquine. So, the work of hydroxychloroquine is to help zinc penetrate the cell.

Dr. Cardillo provides the same explanation in his interview with ABC News. He said that combining hydroxychloroquine with zinc has been the key to the success. The hydroxychloroquine, he said, “opens the zinc channel” allowing the zinc to enter the cell, which then “blocks the replication of cellular machinery.”

“Intracellular Zinc interferes with coronavirus transcription, which results in the ability of the virus to replicate. However, being a ++ ion, extracellular zinc requires active transport to pass across the cell membrane. It so happens that chloroquine is a zinc ionophore, thus provides zinc++ with the transport mechanism. In this instance, chloroquine has no drug action. It is the zinc that is in play, and I find it concerning that so many news organizations (and governments) are failing to convey this fact..opting, instead, to portray chloroquine as having the key drug action,” Dr. Cardillo.

Below is a video of Dr. Cardillo with ABC News.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8OKZbrk8Y7Q