{"doi":"10.36849/jdd.6593","title":"Antimalarials are not Effective as Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis for COVID-19: A Retrospective Matched Control Study","abstract":"The early phase of the COVID-19 pandemic prompted a repurposing of antiviral and immunomodulatory drugs as investigational therapeutics, including hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine. While antimalarials have been well-refuted as a treatment for COVID-19, data on these drugs' role in preventing SARS-CoV-2 infection as pre-exposure prophylaxis is more limited. We investigated the efficacy of antimalarial drugs as pre-exposure SARS-CoV-2 prophylaxis in a US tertiary-care center. We identified all adult patients exposed to antimalarials with active prescriptions from July 1, 2019 to February 29, 2020 and exact-matched antimalarial-treated study patients with controls on age, sex, race, and Charleston Comorbidity Index. We used multivariable logistic regression to calculate the odds ratio (OR) of COVID-19 diagnosis by antimalarial exposure, adjusting for demographics, comorbidities, local infection rates, and specific conditions identified in early studies as risk factors for COVID-19. There were 3,074 patients with antimalarial prescriptions and 58,955 matched controls. Hydroxychloroquine represented 98.8% of antimalarial prescriptions. There were 51 (1.7%) infections among antimalarial-exposed and 973 (1.6%) among controls. No protective effect for SARS-CoV-2 infection was demonstrated among antimalarial-exposed patients in the multivariate model (OR=1.06, 95% CI 0.80-1.40, P=0.70). These findings corroborate prior work demonstrating that hydroxychloroquine and related antimalarials do not have a role in protection against SARS-CoV-2.Klebanov N, Pahalyants V, Said JT, et al. Antimalarials are not effective as pre-exposure prophylaxis for COVID-19: a retrospective matched control study. J Drugs Dermatol. 2023;22(8):840-843. doi:10.36849/JDD.6593.","journal":"Journal of Drugs in Dermatology","year":2023,"id":388632,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":1,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9524,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2023-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":636584,"name":"Vartan Pahalyants","orcid":"0000-0003-4671-620X","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":557075,"name":"Jordan T. Said","orcid":"0000-0002-0357-6916","position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":636585,"name":"William S. Murphy","orcid":"0000-0002-8884-3760","position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":687651,"name":"Nicholas Theodosakis","orcid":"0000-0003-4388-2288","position":4,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1158551,"name":"Joseph Scarry","orcid":null,"position":5,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":866619,"name":"Stacey Duey","orcid":null,"position":6,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":714260,"name":"R. Monina Klevens","orcid":"0000-0003-2073-5576","position":7,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1087517,"name":"Evelyn Lilly","orcid":"0000-0001-5387-0569","position":8,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":627967,"name":"Yevgeniy R. Semenov","orcid":"0000-0002-7387-3094","position":9,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1158550,"name":"Nikokai Klebanov","orcid":null,"position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":8,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-19T01:18:18.214733Z","pmid":"37556518","pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}