Hydroxychloroquine, defended by Professor Didier Raoult during the Covid 19 pandemic, is believed to be the cause of 17,000 deaths

According to a French study published on January 2nd; More than 17,000 deaths are related to hydroxychloroquine.

Was prescribing hydroxychloroquine during the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic a really bad idea? According to a study published this Tuesday, January 2, by the journal Biomedicine & Pharmacotherapy, at the time of the first wave of the Covid-19 epidemic in 2020, almost 17,000 deaths were caused by this drug in six countries, including France. reports Liberation.

Defended by Didier Raoult

“These results highlight the danger of reusing medicines with little evidence,” denounced the scientists from the Hospices Civils de Lyon, authors of the study. In France, in the spring of 2020, the government approved the prescription of “HCQ” for Covid patients at a serious stage, advocated by Professor Raoult, former director of the IHU of Marseille, before abolishing this system in May 2020.

For this study, researchers needed multiple data about the same country, such as the number of patients hospitalized with Covid, their mortality rate and the prescription rate of hydroxychloroquine. This information allowed them to derive the number of Covid deaths who received this drug in France, Belgium, Italy, Spain, Turkey and the United States.

199 deaths in France

The research team from Lyon then applied the result of another study, which was published in Nature communications in spring 2021. This study estimated that hydroxychloroquine increased the patient's risk of death by 11%. They therefore came to the conclusion of 16,990 treatment-related deaths, of which 12,739 were in the USA and 199 in France. In France, Covid had already caused more than 30,000 deaths in the summer of 2020.