Didier Raoult disapproves -partially- of hydroxychloroquine. The man who had widely promoted this drug as a treatment for covid-19 in 2020 retracted it on Twitter on May 4. “I currently agree with the ANSM (National Agency for the Safety of Medicines and Health Products, Editor’s Note) on hydroxychloroquine against Covid,” said the infectologist.
“It no longer works on the Omicron 2022 variant, the concentrations needed to inhibit Omicron are 50 times higher than for the other variants.”
Omicron is the only variant identified in sequencing tests since March 2022, according to data from Public Health France.
“The concentration of hydroxychloroquine in the blood with our protocol was three times the effective dose for the old variants. Not anymore for Omicron. This is science, not dogma,” added the former head of the Institut Hospitalo-Universitaire (IHU) in Marseille. Hydroxychloroquine is generally used in the context of inflammatory and autoimmune diseases.
Didier Raoult left his position as director of IHU Méditerranée Infection on September 1, expelled after a process started a year earlier. He is no longer a university professor-hospital doctor at the University of Aix-Marseille and at the University Hospitals of Marseille.
Hydroxychloroquine has never been shown to be effective against Covid-19
If Didier Raoult does not completely deny his previous statements, in an opinion published at the beginning of April, the National Agency for the Safety of Medicines (ANSM), recalled that “the data published to date do not support a clinical benefit of hydroxychloroquine, associated or not with azithromycin in the treatment of Covid-19, regardless of its context of use”.
“They even show that this use is detrimental to the patient due to greater exposure to adverse effects on cardiac function,” underlines this establishment dependent on the Ministry of Health.
The World Health Organization does not say anything else on its site: it states that it does not recommend hydroxychloroquine to treat COVID-19. This statement “is based on the results of 30 trials involving more than 10,000 patients with COVID-19.”
“Hydroxychloroquine did not reduce mortality, the need for artificial ventilation, or the duration of artificial ventilation,” but “may increase the risk of cardiac arrhythmia, blood and lymphatic disorders, kidney damage, as well as liver disorders and failure,” the agency said. from the ONU. warned.
Source: BFM TV
