Hydroxychloroquine Reduces COVID-19 Mortality, Study Finds

People who took hydroxychloroquine in combination with another drug while hospitalized with COVID-19 were less likely to die than those who didn't, according to a new study.

Hydroxychloroquine, which is widely used against malaria and arthritis, was given to hundreds of patients hospitalized with COVID-19 in Belgium. Thousands of others didn't receive the drug.

Researchers examined records from 352 adults hospitalized in AZ Groeninge Hospital in Kortrijk, Belgium. All patients tested positive for COVID-19 or had results from CT scans that suggested COVID-19 was present. Patients received hydroxychloroquine alone or with azithromycin, an antibiotic. They were scanned before and after treatment.

Researchers compared the results of the record analysis with a control group of 3,533 people hospitalized across Belgium with COVID-19 from March 14, 2020, to May 24, 2020. The people didn't receive hydroxychloroquine but did receive standard of care.

Twenty-eight days following the diagnosis of COVID-19, 59 people treated with hydroxychloroquine had died. The mortality percentage, or 16.7 percent, was lower than the 25.9 percentage in the control group.

Researchers found patients who received hydroxychloroquine were more likely to survive even after adjusting for age and other factors.

"Our study suggests that, despite the controversy surrounding its use, treatment with hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin remains a viable option," Dr. Gert Meeus, a nephrologist with AZ Groeninge Hospital, and other researchers wrote.

The study was published by the journal New Microbes and New Infections. Limitations include the retrospective nature of the study and differences between the treatment and control groups, including the former being younger on average. Authors declared no conflicts of interest or funding. The research adds to a mixed dataset on hydroxychloroquine against COVID-19.

Some other studies have found that hydroxychloroquine recipients were less likely to die, including a study that analyzed records from a health system in Michigan. Many of the positive findings concerned hydroxychloroquine in combination with azithromycin.

So, very carefully, the author(s) of this article took details from the original medical journal publication but did not provide any link or citation for the medical article.

They do this because they figure that their target audience is incapable of finding the original publication and incapable of analyzing it even if they do find it.

Here is the original article: Efficacy and safety of in-hospital treatment of Covid-19 infection with low-dose hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin in hospitalized patients: A retrospective controlled cohort study

Hydroxychloroquine and its parent compound chloroquine are antimalarial drugs. Azithromycin is an antibiotic. There is no biological mechanism for an antimalarial drug to have any effect on a viral infection. Malaria parasites are more different biologically from viruses as bananas are different from orcas. An antibiotic can increase survival if the person develops a bacterial infection as a result of the viral infection.

The thing that concerns me most about this study is that the authors of the study did not match patients in the treatment group to patients in the control group. Matching them would mean selecting controls of the same age, with the same preexisting conditions and demographic background. The control group was, on average, 3.4 years older and had more preexisting conditions. Given that Covid mortality increases significantly with age and that preexisting conditions also raise the risk of dying from Covid, I would say that the differences in the treatment vs. control group are more than enough to explain any differences in Covid mortality.

While they claimed to have "corrected" for the differences in age and preexisting conditions, I am highly skeptical because such "corrections" involve making assumptions. Without a solid evidentiary basis for the assumptions, they hold no weight. In order to show whether a treatment has real benefit, the control and treatment groups absolutely MUST be matched. Maybe they did it this way because when they tried matching groups, they did not observe any benefit to HC +/- azithromycin and they wanted to publish a positive result. Negative results are not actually very publishable.

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