2024-01-03 20:29:57
The Covid-19 pandemic in FrancedossierA French study published on January 2 provides an estimate of the number of deaths at the start of the coronavirus pandemic potentially attributable to the treatment promoted by Didier Raoult.
How bad was prescribing hydroxychloroquine during the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic? A study published Tuesday January 2 by the journal Biomedicine & Pharmacotherapy puts forward an answer: nearly 17,000 deaths are linked to this drug in six countries – including France – during the first wave of Covid-19, in the first quarter of 2020.
“These results illustrate the danger of reusing medications with low-level evidence,” point out the authors of the study, researchers from the Hospices Civils de Lyon. In France, the government authorized the prescription of “HCQ” defended by Didier Raoult, former director of the IHU of Marseille, in March 2020 for serious Covid patients, before repealing this system in May 2020.
A risk of mortality increased by 11%
To arrive at their result, the scientists needed several elements from the same country, namely the number of patients hospitalized with Covid, their mortality rate and the prescription rate of hydroxychloroquine. These elements allowed them to calculate the number of patients who died from Covid having been treated with this drug in France, Belgium, Italy, Spain, Turkey and the United States.
Then, the team of researchers from Lyon applied the results of another study, published in Nature communications in April 2021. This estimated that hydroxychloroquine increased the patient’s risk of mortality by 11%. They thus arrived at the result of 16,990 deaths attributable to treatment, including 12,739 in the United States and 199 in France. In France, Covid had already killed more than 30,000 people in the summer of 2020.
“Molecules whose toxicity is underestimated and whose effectiveness is overestimated”
Another lesson from this study: the great variability in the behavior of white coats. In the six countries considered, the prescription rate for hydroxychloroquine varies from 15.6% in France to 83.5% in Spain. Jean-Christophe Lega, professor at the Hospices Civils de Lyon and head of the research team, is surprised by this “variable, even anarchic, behavior from one hospital to another”.
These raw figures should, however, be taken with a grain of salt. Each of the data used to arrive at this result is subject to margins of error which make the final result imprecise. But this work still allows us to get an idea of what happens when “we generalize prescribing behaviors with molecules whose toxicity we underestimate and overestimate the effectiveness,” underlines Jean-Christophe Lega. These results had already been presented at the congress of the French Society of Pharmacology and Therapeutics in June 2022. Since then, some minor corrections have been made.
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