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 coronavirus (COVID-19) patients.
The letter signed by Shekhar Mande, Director-General, 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 “knee-jerk” reaction.
WHO suspends clinical trials of hydroxychloroquine over safety concerns
“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 COVID-19: 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 COVID-19 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 treatme