Home » Health » “We can say it loud and clear, Didier Raoult is wrong!”: Hydroxychloroquine once again disapproved in a study

“We can say it loud and clear, Didier Raoult is wrong!”: Hydroxychloroquine once again disapproved in a study

France

09:13 24.05.2020(updated 10:44 May 24, 2020) Short url

Professor Jean-François Bergmann, former vice-president of the ANSM, condemns pseudo-sciences, including the hydroxychloroquine recommended by Didier Raoult. Its effectiveness was recently challenged in a study of 96,000 patients.

This may be the study that will end the use of chloroquine against Covid-19 in France. Published Friday May 22 in Lancet, it highlights the ineffectiveness of this drug, which is even associated with an increased risk of mortality. Professor Jean-François Bergmann, vice-president of the National Agency for the Safety of Medicines and Health Products (ANSM) from 2003 to 2013, commented to the Parisian the controversy surrounding the treatment advocated by the infectiologist Didier Raoult.

“Now that the situation has calmed down, we can say it loud and clear, this gentleman is wrong!”, He says, saying that enough evidence is now gathered to prove the ineffectiveness of this molecule in treatment. from Covid-19.

He mentioned the study of 96,000 hospital patients, the results of which showed “a decrease in hospital survival and an increase in the frequency of ventricular arrhythmias” linked to chloroquine, without even being able to confirm its effectiveness.

According to Bergmann, also former chief of internal medicine at Lariboisière Hospital in Paris, the slowness of research in France has favored the emergence of these pseudo-sciences. “We took it in the face. He had the treatment and we were morons to whom he refused any scientific debate. We were silent with elegance, ”he says. He also points to the administrative heaviness in France regarding the validation of drugs, regretting that research is “not valued enough”.

A vaccine rather than a treatment

While other large clinical trials are still in progress, the professor favors waiting for a vaccine, recalling that no drug is still treating chickenpox, measles or mumps today. Against the new coronavirus, researchers urgently favored the use of already existing drugs, but the results are “often disappointing”.

“You have to treat the symptoms and wait for the vaccine. When all the big labs get started, it usually works. It is a real hope, ”he concludes with the Paris daily.

The end of hydroxychloroquine against Covid-19?

One day after the publication of the study of Lancet, the Minister of Health, Olivier Véran asked the High Council for Public Health (HCSP) to propose within 48 hours “a review of the overriding prescription rules” for various treatments, including hydroxychloroquine.

Already restricted in France, it is only used in hospitals and for the most serious cases. This molecule derived from an antimalarial may therefore no longer be prescribed in the territory as part of a treatment against Covid-19. Earlier this week, Didier Raoult spoke of a “collective media hallucination on hydroxychloroquine, one of the most prescribed drugs in the world”, adding that “those who do not want to take it go crazy”.

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