How many Covid-19 patients have died from being given hydroxychloroquine? A French study that proposed an estimate among patients hospitalized during the first wave of the pandemic was retracted on August 26 by the journal Biomedicine and PharmacotherapyThis editorial decision pleases those who defend the “Raoult protocol”, but worries some pharmacologists and epidemiologists, who believe that this withdrawal was not justified.
Jean-Christophe Lega, however, was careful not to hold anything back in the face of the uncertainties surrounding the results of the study he led, published in early 2024. With his colleagues, this doctor and epidemiologist from the University of Lyon-I had arrived at the figure of 17,000 deaths in six countries – including 199 for France – but agreed that the very wide confidence interval meant that the reality could be between 3,000 and 30,000 deaths. He also noted that the poor quality of many databases had not allowed these calculations to be made in countries where hydroxychloroquine was widely prescribed, such as Brazil or India, so that deaths linked to this treatment must in reality be higher. Not to mention prescriptions outside the hospital context.
Remember that no serious study has been able to demonstrate the effectiveness of hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) against Covid-19; the opposite has been shown. This molecule promoted by Didier Raoult in combination with the antibiotic azithromycin could in particular present cardiac toxicity: the first deaths recorded at the beginning of 2020 by pharmacovigilance networks also led the director of the IHU Méditerranée to exclude certain patients at risk from this prescription.
Critical letters
Jean-Christophe Lega’s objective was therefore to evaluate the number of patients to whom the molecule had been administered and, based on the rate of excess mortality induced provided by a British study (Axfors et al., Nature Communications2021), to calculate the number of them who would have succumbed to the treatment. This methodology was immediately attacked on social media.
“I quickly received numerous fairly standard emails, often polite, sometimes not, calling into question the integrity of our results.”says the epidemiologist. The presidency of his university is also the target of criticism. There he finds arguments formulated by the statistician Vincent Pavan, president of the association Réinfo Liberté, or spread by friendly sites of the “raoultosphere”, France-Soir and Bonsens.info, the latter announcing that it had notified the magazine, through a lawyer, to respond to its criticisms.
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