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The study concluded that the drug regimens increased in-hospital death and frequency of arrhythmias.
The head of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) — India’s largest chain of industrial laboratories — and two other scientists have castigated an influential study published in the Lancet, which purported to show hydroxychloroquine (HCQ), a prominent antimalarial, as being unhelpful and harmful to COVID19 patients. The letter signed by Shekhar Mande, DirectorGeneral, CSIR; Anurag Agrawal, physician and Director, Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology — a CSIR institute — as well as Rajeeva Karandikar, Director, Chennai Mathematical Institute, says the World Health Organization’s decision to suspend trials of the drug was a “kneejerk” reaction. “The observational data is sloppy, and the statistics underlying them is faulty. There is no doubt that it will not stand the test of time. You can’t compare apples with oranges,” Mr. Mande told The Hindu. The study, “Hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine with or without a macrolide for treatment of COVID19: a multinational registry analysis”, was published online on May 22. It studied records from 96,032 patients hospitalised between December 20, 2019, and April 14, 2020, and sought to investigate whether COVID19 positive patients on HCQ alone, HCQ combined with an antibiotic, choloroquine (CQ, an older version of HCQ), and CQ with an antibiotic, benefited over those who were on other treatments. ‘Benefit’ here was defined as either having improved inhospital survival or less likely to suffer from irregular heartbeat, a side effect associated with HCQ. The study concluded that the drug regimens increased inhospital death by 3345% and increased frequency of ventricular arrhythmias by several degrees. On May 25, the WHO cited this study and said it had “temporarily suspended” clinical trials of hydroxychloriquine as a potential treatment for COVID19. This trial was part of a socalled solidarity trial being overseen by the WHO where four drug combinations — all of them developed for other diseases but showing promise for COVID19 treatment — were being tested at four hundred hospitals in 35 countries. France, Italy and Belgium have also halted HCQ trials. A WHO pause doesn’t stop a country — even India — from conducting any form of trial, Mr. Mande said.
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