Yesterday, the World Health Organization suspended trials of hydroxychloroquine because of safety concerns. Citing the findings published Friday in The Lancetº, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said evidence has shown harmful side effects, including heart problems:
"The executive group has implemented a temporary pause of the hydroxychloroquine arm within the Solidarity Trial while the safety data is reviewed by the data safety monitoring board. The other arms of the trial are continuing,” Tedros said in an online briefing from Geneva.
Dr. Soumya Swaminathan, the WHO's chief scientist, said the organization's investigators and regulators in individual countries have raised enough red flags to prompt the halt.
[…] The WHO will take at least another week, perhaps two, to gather more data, Swaminathan said.
Specifically:
Last week’s study examined the effect of chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine on nearly 100,000 coronavirus patients from about 700 hospitals across six continents. The study threw cold water on largely unsupported claims that the two drugs could help fight off COVID-19.
“Not only is there no benefit, but we saw a very consistent signal of harm,” heart specialist and study leader Dr. Mandeep Mehra wrote in the study.
Scientists believe that the death rate from patients taking chloroquine or hydroxychloroquine, with or without an antibiotic, is about 13% — up from 9% among patients not taking them.
Whether or not “Do no harm” is in the Hippocratic Oath, no reputable medical institution would give credence to an unsupported theory about the efficacy of a substance that’s killing people, and continuing to study it lends credence about its potential. As Steve Benen noted last week at the Maddowblog, there was already plenty of information about hydroxychloroquine’s harmful effects before The Lancet published its piece:
Whether the president understands this or not, there have been several recent reports pointing to the fact that this medication, at best, is useless when it comes to treating or preventing COVID-19. At worst, if used improperly by people who don't need it, hydroxychloroquine can apparently be quite dangerous.
It's what the Journal of the American Medical Association found. And what the New England Journal of Medicine found. In recent weeks, we've seen similar assessments from the NIH and the FDA, the latter of which pointed to risks of serious side effects, "including heart rhythm problems, severely low blood pressure and muscle or nerve damage."
Will this latest news stop trump from trumpeting the wonders of hydroxychloroquine? The smart money says no:
Recent history makes clear that Trump likes thumbing his nose at those who take science, evidence, scholarship, and independent research seriously, but this is starting to look like a rather extreme example of the phenomenon.
Postscript: Let's not overlook the fact that the president is so committed to ignoring the evidence on hydroxychloroquine that he last week accused his own Department of Veterans Affairs of conspiring against him with research that contradicted his assumptions.
Given trump’s hostility toward WHO, I expect him to double down on his claims that he alone can fix COVID-19 by taking a drug that could worsen his own heart problems, at least until June when WHO publishes its findings on hydroxychloroquine safety (and maybe even after that).
* According to Harvard Medical School
º see also: Mark Hennon’s write-up here