A fantastic new study revealed that the controversial antimalarial drug known as hydroxychloroquine aided patients in survival inside hospitals.
However, the discovery, just like the federal government’s use of the drug itself, was disputed.
The Study
A team from the Henry Ford Health System in southeast Michigan stated that their study, which was carried on 2,541 hospitalized patients, revealed that those who were administered the highly-disputed drug had a slighter possibility of dying.
A report from the team that was published in the International Journal of Infectious Diseases reads:
“Overall crude mortality rates were 18.1% in the entire cohort, 13.5% in the hydroxychloroquine alone group, 20.1% among those receiving hydroxychloroquine plus azithromycin, 22.4% among the azithromycin alone group, and 26.4% for neither drug.”
It’s a fantastic discovery because other studies haven’t noticed any benefit in hydroxychloroquine, a drug initially developed to prevent and treat malaria.
President Donald Trump heavily praised the drug, but subsequent studies showed that patients did worse after getting the drug and were more likely to present cardiac side effects.
The US Food and Drug Administration withdrew the emergency use authorization for the drug earlier this month. It looks like that would become a worldwide decision, considering the trials promoted by the World Health Organization and the National Institutes of Health, which were halted for the moment.
Though the Henry Ford team claims that its findings are strong evidence that hydroxychloroquine can be a suitable treatment against the novel coronavirus, other scientists beg to differ, claiming that the steroid dexamethasone can be accounted for the better survival of some patients.
In a news conference, Dr. Marcus Zervos, division head of infectious disease for the Henry Ford Health System, said:
“Our results do differ from some other studies.”
“What we think was important in ours … is that patients were treated early. For hydroxychloroquine to have a benefit, it needs to begin before the patients begin to suffer some of the severe immune reactions that patients can have with COVID,” he clarified.
