Display Morehttps://www.thelancet.com/jour…-6736(20)31180-6/fulltext
This pretty well ends the bullsh*t about hydroxychloroquine with or without a macrolide antibiotic like azithromycin being effective. 96,000 patients reviewed. Across several levels of severity. vs non-treated controls. Results suggest the drugs may make things worse and have no overall benefit.
Having invested almost $1000 to obtain plenty of HCQ and Azi from the US, Canada and India, I am not happy to see this. Does anyone seriously think this study appearing in the highly prestigious Lancet (for more than a century one of the best medical journals in the world) does anyone think this is political? If so, get a life. Summary conclusions:
"96 032 patients (mean age 53·8 years, 46·3% women) with COVID-19 were hospitalised during the study period and met the inclusion criteria. Of these, 14 888 patients were in the treatment groups (1868 received chloroquine, 3783 received chloroquine with a macrolide, 3016 received hydroxychloroquine, and 6221 received hydroxychloroquine with a macrolide) and 81 144 patients were in the control group. 10 698 (11·1%) patients died in hospital. After controlling for multiple confounding factors (age, sex, race or ethnicity, body-mass index, underlying cardiovascular disease and its risk factors, diabetes, underlying lung disease, smoking, immunosuppressed condition, and baseline disease severity), when compared with mortality in the control group (9·3%), hydroxychloroquine (18·0%; hazard ratio 1·335, 95% CI 1·223–1·457), hydroxychloroquine with a macrolide (23·8%; 1·447, 1·368–1·531), chloroquine (16·4%; 1·365, 1·218–1·531), and chloroquine with a macrolide (22·2%; 1·368, 1·273–1·469) were each independently associated with an increased risk of in-hospital mortality. Compared with the control group (0·3%), hydroxychloroquine (6·1%; 2·369, 1·935–2·900), hydroxychloroquine with a macrolide (8·1%; 5·106, 4·106–5·983), chloroquine (4·3%; 3·561, 2·760–4·596), and chloroquine with a macrolide (6·5%; 4·011, 3·344–4·812) were independently associated with an increased risk of de-novo ventricular arrhythmia during hospitalisation."
My note: it is hard to argue against the finding that the drugs, if they helped at all, did not help much. You could claim that maybe the sickest patients got HCQ and AZI so the controls are invalid. That is improbable but you can't rule it out without *prospective* (not like this one retrospective) randomized double blind controlled studies with prematched experimental and control groups. You can bet a lot of such studies are now ongoing and will be reported soon. What is very clear from this is that any benefit of HCQ and AZI, if it exists, if certainly not, as many claimed, "ground breaking." This is very disappointing. I wonder what Dr. Strangelove (also known as Raoult) has to say about it.
HCQ is a highly active drug - with plausible lab claims for antiviral activity and also immune system modulation. So you can see why the interest. It does not mean that it works.
It remains possible that it works in some way. But not the magic bullet or anything like it. Too many negative studies now.
And all those establishment doctors who were cautious were right to be cautious.