Hydroxychloroquine: What is being said?
Surgisphere scandal
Earlier this year, The Guardian published a joint investigative report from its Australia and U.K. newsrooms that discovered that the World Health Organization and several national governments changed their COVID-19 policy recommendations based on articles from the New England Journal of Medicine and the Lancet.
The journal articles concluded that hydroxychloroquine contributed to a higher death rate among COVID-19 sufferers. Trials of the drug that were going on at the time were halted because of the direct result of the studies.
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Yet the main data set that both studies relied upon was from a tiny U.S.-based health care analytics company called Surgisphere. The Guardian discovered that the outfit employed a sci-fi writer and an adult-content model who have no data or scientific background.
The Lancet study listed Surgisphere founder Sapan Desai as one of its co-authors and claimed to have analyzed data that the healthcare analytics company had assembled from approximately 96,000 patients who had contracted the coronavirus and who had been admitted to 671 hospitals from their database of 1,200 hospitals around the world.
Both the Lancet and NEJM articles were formally retracted and it was announced that trials of the drug would resume.
“On the basis of the available mortality data, the members of the committee recommended that there are no reasons to modify the trial protocol,” Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO director general, said at the time.
“The executive group received this recommendation and endorsed continuation of all arms of the Solidarity trial, including hydroxychloroquine.”
In late July 2020, The New York Times reported that Desai was described as "a man in a hurry, a former whiz kid willing to cut corners, misrepresent information or embellish his credentials as he pursued his ambitions."
A journal article in question
An article in the International Journal of Infectious Diseases published earlier this year claimed that hydroxychloroquine improved patients' chances of survival. President Trump retweeted the study, which was from the Henry Ford Health System in southeastern Michigan, on July 6, saying that the Democrats had politically disparaged him for promoting the drug.
Among the key findings of the study were that "[o]verall crude mortality rates were 18.1% in the entire cohort, 13.5% in the hydroxychloroquine alone group, 20.1% among those receiving hydroxychloroquine and plus azithromycin, 22.4% among the azithromycin alone group, and 26.4% for neither drug."
Yet according to letters to the editor from medical professionals, the study contained many errors and biases. That some were given the drug but not others may have introduced bias into the study, the letters suggested.
As reported by CNN, Amit Malviya of the Department of Cardiology at North Eastern Indira Gandhi Regional Institute of Health and Medical Sciences wrote that before the drug is offered regularly, "there is absolutely no substitute for properly conducted randomised trials, for such drug interventions which have a public health importance."
Three other medical researchers from the University of Albany wrote that some who were given the drug have fared better because they were healthier to begin with and got more aggressive treatment.
