As the Covid-19 pandemic hit the entire world, various avenues of treatment were explored by the scientific community. Among them, hydroxychloroquine has clearly divided the camps. Quickly, the molecule promoted by Professor Didier Raoult had been removed from the medical trajectory following the publication of a series of studies reporting adverse effects, even higher mortality after administration in patients. Recently, a study presented to the congress of the French Society of Pharmacology and Therapeutics (SFPT) on June 14 took stock of these mortalities for six countries, including France.
According to this work carried out by Jean-Christophe Lega, professor of therapy at the Hospices Civils de Lyon, hydroxychloroquine would have caused the death of more than 16,000 people in all six countries, namely Belgium, Spain, France. , Italy, Turkey and the United States. To achieve this result, the researchers started from a study published in 2020 in the journal Nature. This had estimated that the risk of mortality was increased by 11% in hospitalized patients who had been prescribed hydroxycholoquine.
From there, the team sifted through each country’s public databases to obtain and compare the rate of hydroxychloroquine prescription among hospitalized patients, and hospital mortality. “By applying the rate of 11% to the data obtained, it was thus possible to estimate the number of deaths attributable to hydroxychloroquine individually by country”, explained Jean-Christophe Lega during the congress.
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In France, taking hydroxychloroquine would have caused the death of 199 hospitalized patients. The figures vary considerably from one country to another, ranging from 95 for Turkey to 1895 for Spain, for the European continent. In the United States, the estimate reaches 11,890 deaths. “It is a huge scandal because all these deaths are unacceptable. They were avoidable”, protests Mathieu Molimard, head of the medical pharmacology department at the Bordeaux University Hospital and member of the SFPT. There are also significant differences in the average prescription rate for hydroxychloroquine, which varies from 16% in France to 84% in Spain. Concretely, in France, around 16 patients hospitalized in emergency out of 100 would have received a treatment containing the molecule.
“The worst is that these figures are clearly underestimated,” continues Mathieu Molimard. For good reason, the study only focused on the first wave of Covid and only takes into account deaths in hospitals, which leaves out all the people who received treatment with hydroxychloroquine at home. Finally, it is likely that, in the emergency, the statements of the number of people who were prescribed the controversial molecule were neglected.
If hydroxychloroquine remains a treatment of choice in the context of other pathologies such as lupus, its misuse during Covid would therefore have indeed contributed to increasing the already considerable death toll. According to Mathieu Molimard, “it is a dramatic message on the deviations that can result from research and in particular from the “wild” clinical trials carried out on patients in France with regard to hydroxychloroquine”.
