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

17,000 people have lost their lives due to hydroxychloroquine. XinHua

According to a French study published on January 2; more than 17,000 deaths are linked to hydroxychloroquine.

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

Defended by Didier Raoult

"These results illustrate the danger of reusing drugs with low-level evidence", denounce scientists from the Hospices Civils de Lyon, authors of the  ;rsquo;study. In France, the government has authorized the prescription of HCQ, advocated by Professor Raoult, former director of the IHU of Marseille, in spring 2020 for Covid patients at a serious stage, before canceling this system in May 2020.

As part of this study, the researchers needed several data on 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 deduce the number of Covid deaths who received this drug in France, Belgium, Italy, Spain, Turkey as well as the United States.

199 deaths in France

Subsequently, the team of researchers from Lyon applied the results of another study, published in Nature communications in spring  2021. This study estimated that hydroxychloroquine increased the patient's risk of death by 11%. They thus arrived at the result of 16,990 deaths linked to treatment, including 12,739 in the United States and 199 in France. In France, Covid had already caused more than 30,000 deaths in the summer of 2020.

These statistics should nevertheless be taken with a grain of salt, recalls Libération. The data used for this study is subject to margins of error. These figures had already been mentioned at the congress of the French Society of Pharmacology and Therapeutics in June 2022. Since then, some minor fixes have been added.