Did HCQ Really Cause 17,000 Deaths? Experts Weigh in on Flawed But Highly Touted Study

Nearly 17,000 people in the U.S. and five other countries “may have died” early in the pandemic because they used hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) to treat COVID-19, according to a paper published in the February 2024 issue of Biomedicine & Pharmacotherapy.

Major media outlets, including Politico, The Hill and Forbes ran with the headline.

However, physicians and scientists interviewed by The Defender said the study’s authors based their conclusions on flawed data and ignored the large body of evidence showing the efficacy of HCQ for early, outpatient treatment of the virus.

The French study is a retrospective meta-analysis of 44 papers with data on hospitalized patients in the U.S., France, Belgium, Italy, Spain and Turkey from March through July 2020.

The researchers stated that mortality rates varied significantly from across hospitals and regions, and acknowledged they could not account for how these rates were influenced by “age, sex, comorbidities, ICU capacity, improvement in COVID-19 management” and other factors.

For 90% of the total hospitalizations reviewed, the researchers had to guess at the rate of patients exposed to HCQ, offering ranges from a low of 16.3% to a high of 99.1%. In the U.S., which accounted for 73% of the study’s data set, that number ranged from 16.3% to 75.9%, or between 144,750 and 674,020 patients.

They also had to guess how much HCQ or its analog chloroquine (CQ) was administered. Furthermore, they readily admitted, “The effect of HCQ on mortality was the main source of uncertainty for the proposed estimates” and that those estimates could be overstated by a factor of 5 (i.e., only 3,000 may have died) or understated by a factor of 2 (i.e., 30,000 may have died).

The study also said nothing about the impact of other drugs patients may have received, such as remdesivir, or whether patients were put on ventilators prior to dying. These two factors alone — widely practiced in U.S. hospitals during the pandemic — are known to have significantly increased COVID-19 mortality.

Dr. Peter McCullough told The Defender the 44 studies used in the meta-analysis were “heterogeneous” and that “Nonrandomized, retrospective cross-sectional cohorts created from administrative data demonstrated confounding by indication.”

In other words, this type of look-back study could not reliably tell if HCQ had an effect or not as it is unable to control for the various ways the treatment and non-treatment groups differed from the start, nor could it account for the different methods or results used in the studies.

“That means hospitalists desperate to help patients administered HCQ too late in the course and patients were too far gone,” McCullough said. “In this circumstance, it wasn’t the HCQ that caused death — it was COVID-19 illness…