The World Health Organization has announced that it has decided to end clinical trials of hydroxychloroquine as a potential treatment for hospitalized Covid-19 patients on Wednesday, concluding that the antimalarial is not reducing their death rates.
"The internal evidence from the Solidarity / Discovery Trial, the external evidence from the Recovery Trial and the combined evidence from these two largely randomized trials, put together, suggests that hydroxychloroquine - when compared with the usual treatments of inpatients for Covid-19 - does not result in reduced mortality in these patients, "said Dr. Ana Maria Henao Restrepo, of WHO, during a virtual press conference in Geneva.
“No beneficial effect” when it comes to Covid-19
The European study Discovery is evaluating the effectiveness of four treatments for Covid-19. For Recovery, the first major clinical trial (carried out by the British University of Oxford) to have produced results, hydroxychloroquine has "no beneficial effect" in terms of Covid-19.
"On the basis of these analyzes and the study of the evidence produced (...), after deliberations, it was concluded that the weapon of hydroxychloroquine will be withdrawn from the Solidarity Test," said doctor Ana Maria on Wednesday. Henao Restrepo. However, it stressed that the decision to stop the trials on hospital patients with Covid-19 did not concern the use or evaluation of this molecule as a preventive treatment for disease caused by the new coronavirus.
The announcement comes two days after U.S. health authorities revoked permission to use two antimalarials for Covid-19, chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine, championed by President Donald Trump, in an emergency. France, where a controversial doctor, Professor Didier Raoult, defended hydroxychloroquine, banned its use on May 28 against Covid-19.
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