Professor Raoult was therefore wrong: hydroxychloroquine, a supposedly miracle drug against Covid, was ineffective against the virus

Four years after the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic, history has caught up with him. But not in the sense expected by the microbiologist, known for his positions sometimes going against the grain of scientific consensus.

WHO calls for better preparation for future pandemics

A study published this Tuesday, January 2 by the journal Biomedicine & Pharmacotherapy highlights the extent to which the idea was not judicious: not only did it conclude that hydroxychloroquine was not an effective treatment against the disease but, above all, it attributed 17,000 deaths during the pandemic caused by the administration of the drug in six countries – including Belgium – during the first wave of Covid-19, in the first quarter of 2020. “These results illustrate the danger of reusing drugs with weak evidence level”, point out the authors of the study, researchers from the Hospices Civils de Lyon.

To arrive at this figure, the scientists who authored the study started, by country, from the number of patients hospitalized with Covid, their mortality rate and the rate of prescription 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.

A risk of mortality increased by 11%

Then, the team of researchers from Lyon applied the result of another study, published in Nature communications in April 2021. This estimated that hydroxychloroquine increased the patient’s risk of mortality by 11%. Result: 17,000 deaths, a figure which only represents the tip of the iceberg, since only six countries are studied, only between March and July 2020, and only concerning deaths in hospitals. Huge territories, which have used hydroxychloroquine a lot, such as India or Brazil, have for example not been studied…