There was plenty of hype about the drug during the early months of the pandemic. On March 28, 2020, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) granted Emergency Use Authorization (EUA), allowing doctors to use HCQ and chloroquine (CQ) products in situations where clinical trials were not an option.
Last month, the FDA withdrew the EUA. The agency explains that it “has determined that CQ and HCQ are unlikely to be effective in treating COVID-19 for the authorized uses in the EUA. Additionally, in light of ongoing serious cardiac adverse events and other serious side effects, the known and potential benefits of CQ and HCQ no longer outweigh the known and potential risks for the authorized use.”
Clinical trials using the drug have shown mixed results and been marred with controversy. After an investigation by The Guardian into the quality of data analysis provided by a company called Surgisphere, the authors of one high-profile study in The Lancet retracted the paper.
Several institutions have since halted their HCQ studies, including the World Health Organization (WHO) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
Now, a new study in the International Journal of Infectious Diseases — by researchers from the Henry Ford Health System, in Michigan — reports that treatment with HCQ alone and in combination with the antibiotic azithromycin reduced the number of deaths among people in the hospital with severe COVID-19.
Comparing mortality rates
The corresponding author is Dr. Marcus J. Zervos, an infectious disease specialist at Henry Ford Hospital and the Wayne State University School of Medicine, both in Detroit, MI.
For their study, the team retrospectively reviewed the medical records of 2,541 individuals who received treatment for COVID-19 in Henry Ford Health System hospitals.
The aim of the research was to compare how many people with COVID-19 died while in the hospital after receiving either HCQ, HCQ and azithromycin, azithromycin on its own, or “other treatments for COVID-19,” as the authors explain in their paper.
Treatment with HCQ, azithromycin, or both began within 24 hours of hospital admission in 82% of cases, and within 48 hours of admission in 91% of cases.
Among the 2,541 patients in the study, 460 died, which equates to an overall mortality rate of 18.1%. In the group of 409 patients who received neither HCQ nor azithromycin, 108 died, representing a mortality rate of 26.4%.
A total of 1,202 patients received only HCQ, of whom 162 died, a mortality rate of 13.5%, while out of the 147 patients who received only azithromycin, 33 died, equating to a mortality rate of 22.4%......More
