‘Antimalarial drug shows no benefits’
A drug touted by US President Donald Trump as a game-changer in the fight against Covid-19 showed no benefits for patients, according to a study conducted with more than 1,400 people in hospitals in New York city, the epicentre of the American epidemic.
According to the study conducted by University of Albany, the anti-malarial drug Hydroxychloroquine had no noticeable effect on patients, even when take together with the antibiotic azithromycin. “Among patients hospitalised in metropolitan New York with Covid-19, treatment with hydroxychloroquine, azithromycin, or both, compared with neither treatment, was not significantly associated with differences in in-hospital mortality,” researchers said in the study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Cardiac arrest was a key side effect when hydroxychloroquine was used together with azithromycin, according to the study. But not when only antimalarial drug was administered.
This was an observational study of severely ill hospitalised patients who had been prescribed the medicines, and not a randomised clinical trial, the gold standard for determining the efficacy and safety of a drug.
President Trump had initially campaigned for the drug to be administered to patients arguing they had nothing to lose because it had been proven to be safe for humans. He also tried to shore up the availability of the drug in the US and leaned on India, one of the largest producers of hydroxychloroquine in the world, to release a massive US purchase order of the drug blocked from shipping by an export ban on it and two dozen other medicines.
The Indian government lifted the curbs and the US consignment shipped shortly.
The US Food and Drug Administration, which had allowed the antimalarial drug to be used on compassionate grounds earlier, restricted its use only for clinical trials strictly under the supervision of physicians subsequently, citing toxic after-effects.