All the Ways the Influential Hydroxychloroquine Study Was Crap

https://gizmodo.com/all-the-ways-the-influential-hydroxychloroquine-study-w-1844378680

A controversial, highly influential study touting the drug hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for covid-19—one that helped launch months of research and failed clinical trials—has now been sharply criticized within the pages of the same scientific journal that published it. The new post-publication peer review highlights a variety of serious flaws in the study and concludes that the authors were “fully irresponsible” in how they presented their findings.

The original paper, authored by a team of researchers in France, was published in late March in the International Journal of Antimicrobial Agents. It was said to involve 20 hospitalized patients with confirmed covid-19 who were treated with hydroxychloroquine, some of whom were also given the antibiotic azithromycin. Compared to a control group of patients, the study claimed, people on hydroxychloroquine had lower levels of the virus on average or cleared the infection more quickly; the addition of azithromycin was associated with even faster recovery.

Though there had been earlier, promising trials of hydroxychloroquine to treat covid-19 elsewhere in the world, the French study sparked massive scientific and political interest in the drug. President Trump himself tweeted about the study the day after it came out, heralding the combination therapy as a “game changer” for the pandemic. Soon after, the U.S. government and others, including the World Health Organization, announced that they would start large-scale trials to test out hydroxychloroquine and the related drug chloroquine.

But it wasn’t long before other scientists began to raise questions about the study, how it was carried out, and the scientists who conducted it, particularly the senior author, a physician and microbiologist named Didier Raoult. Though Raoult had genuinely contributed to important research in the past, he and his lab were also previously accused of glaring errors and misconduct in their published work, with one episode leading to a year-long ban from a prominent microbiology journal. Once his hydroxychloroquine study began making waves, researchers unearthed other alleged examples of data fakery in some of his earlier research.

Rosendaal’s scathing review echoes many of the same criticisms made by outside scientists following the study’s publication. In particular, he condemns the decision by Raoult’s team to exclude from the study’s final results six patients who took hydroxychloroquine, including four whose condition worsened, one of whom eventually died during the study period (none in the control group died). There were also other inconsistencies, such as supplemental material mentioning that a number of asymptomatic patients were included for study while the study’s actual language claimed that it was an examination of hospitalized patients (people without symptoms are unlikely to have been hospitalized for covid-19).