Hydroxychloroquine Reduces COVID-19 Mortality, Study Finds

The Epoch times ^ | 10/9/2023 | Zachary Stieber

[KittyKares]

My wife has been taking hydroxycycline for decades. ...
She was hospitalized in 2020 for Covid. They refused to let her take her HCQ. I think they were afraid it would make her better.
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It’s extraordinary how they denied people such simple treatment. And your wife was taking it for decades!! How could they deny her this medicine? It boggles my mind. I hope she came out of the hospital ok.

[KittyKares]

Yes, Zelenko was a good and wise man. A hero really.
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He was amazing. I am so sorry that cancer took him away from us.

[dkGba]

He was such an amazing human being- fighting for us while battling terminal cancer.

[popdonnelly]

One lie among many. Some people are full paranoid where Trump is concerned.

[Shady]

Got about half way through. First thing in ze AM, almost made me puke.

[exDemMom]

So, very carefully, the author(s) of this article took details from the original medical journal publication but did not provide any link or citation for the medical article.

They do this because they figure that their target audience is incapable of finding the original publication and incapable of analyzing it even if they do find it.

Here is the original article: Efficacy and safety of in-hospital treatment of Covid-19 infection with low-dose hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin in hospitalized patients: A retrospective controlled cohort study

Hydroxychloroquine and its parent compound chloroquine are antimalarial drugs. Azithromycin is an antibiotic. There is no biological mechanism for an antimalarial drug to have any effect on a viral infection. Malaria parasites are more different biologically from viruses as bananas are different from orcas. An antibiotic can increase survival if the person develops a bacterial infection as a result of the viral infection.

The thing that concerns me most about this study is that the authors of the study did not match patients in the treatment group to patients in the control group. Matching them would mean selecting controls of the same age, with the same preexisting conditions and demographic background. The control group was, on average, 3.4 years older and had more preexisting conditions. Given that Covid mortality increases significantly with age and that preexisting conditions also raise the risk of dying from Covid, I would say that the differences in the treatment vs. control group are more than enough to explain any differences in Covid mortality.

While they claimed to have "corrected" for the differences in age and preexisting conditions, I am highly skeptical because such "corrections" involve making assumptions. Without a solid evidentiary basis for the assumptions, they hold no weight. In order to show whether a treatment has real benefit, the control and treatment groups absolutely MUST be matched. Maybe they did it this way because when they tried matching groups, they did not observe any benefit to HC +/- azithromycin and they wanted to publish a positive result. Negative results are not actually very publishable.