Hydroxychloroquine was one of the drugs of choice of US President Donald Trump and former head of state of Brazil Jair Bolsonaro during the corona pandemic, although the antimalarial drug’s effectiveness against the coronavirus has never been proven. Now a French study has been withdrawn, which was a key factor in the hype surrounding the drug at the time.
The study by French scientists published four and a half years ago in the ‘International Journal of Antimbiotic Agents’, co-owned by the International Society for Antimbiotic Chemotherapy (ISAC), caused an unprecedented stir. This also affected the Covid-19 policies of entire states. The scientific journal Nature wrote on Wednesday: “At the beginning of the pandemic, laboratory studies and some reports from China suggested that hydroxyquloroquine could help treat Covid-19. (Didier) Raoult, then head of the IHU (Infection Research Facility in Marseille; note), was a strong supporter of this idea. On March 16, 2020, he and his IHU colleagues reported in a preprint that hydroxychloroquine, in some cases together with the antibiotic azithromycin, had reduced the viral load of SARS-CoV-2 in 20 participants.”
The investigation was immediately hyped by American television stations. Four days later the work was published in the ‘International Journal of Antimbiotic Agents’, where co-author Jean-Marc Rolain was even editor-in-chief. The scientific journal accepted the submitted manuscript within a day. This usually takes at least weeks. Regardless, Trump even described the age-old anti-malarial drug as a “gift from God.” The case is ‘groundbreaking’. Several countries, including the US, even allowed the use of hydroxychloroquine for Covid-19.
One person died during testing
Researchers had repeatedly criticized the controversial study, raising concerns about data quality, unclear ethics and other factors. Six people treated with hydroxychloroquine even dropped out of a study; one of them died and three were transferred to an intensive care unit.
Retracted study, cited 3,600 times worldwide
In any case, the publication’s withdrawal was now welcomed by Elsevier publishers. “This is incredibly good news,” said Elisabeth Bik, an image forensics expert and scientific integrity consultant in San Francisco who is among the critics of the article and Raoult’s work and also analyzed it for the magazine. The French scientist has now retired. The study was cited 3,600 times by other experts in surveys around the world. This makes it the second most cited study ever to have to be retracted.
Source: Krone
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