Upon closer look, new French study fails to prove hydroxychloroquine > placebo.

The study is SCIENTIFIC MALPRACTICE, according to a ICU doc at Intermountain Medical Center.

I find his educated perspective pertinent. He promotes continued study of HCQ (he is personally running a clinical trial of HCQ), but believes it’s crazy/reckless to widely promote its use when the data suggests a very low likelihood that it works any better than a placebo.

“This new report from the same French group about HCQ + Azithro (+ceftriaxone, apparently) is scientific malpractice. Here's why I believe so:

The patient population isn't clear. Of the 80 patients "enrolled," 33 (41%) only had a head cold, while 43 (54%) had pneumonia. (They don't account for the missing 4 patients.) Cryptic language about only studying patients with 3 days of therapy and followup for five days raises immediate red flags about biased exclusion of relevant patients.

Even ignoring that, only 12/80 (15%) even had any respiratory failure. So 85% of this cohort wouldn't even qualify for hospital admission. In other words (estimating from the sparse account), this is a report of 68 outpatients and 12 inpatients. Of the 12 who actually had a reason to be in the hospital, 4 (30%) of them went to the ICU or died.

Of the outpatients, 65 seemed to do well (although it's not clear whether they followed them after they left the hospital, so we don't know). These numbers are entirely in line with what everyone else is seeing among patients with mild disease.

Their claim that "the combination of hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin resulted in a clinical improvement that appeared significant" (except of course in the man who died, but his case was beyond treatment they say) is arch nonsense at the level of an infomercial hawking herbal supplements for baldness.

We're all scared, we're all worried, we all want to find treatments beyond locking ourselves in our houses for 2 months, but that must not cause scientists to abandon scientific principles when it comes to medicine. Science is not the measure of our lives or the full measure of our society, but it's by far the best way to find effective treatments for terrible diseases.

Now is not the time to abandon scientific principles, especially for scientists. When this is submitted to peer review, it must be held to scientific standards.”


ADDENDUM:
When he was asked about Dr Zelenko in NY, who claims to have treated 350 patients with HCQ and achieved a 100% success rate, he said:

“The general experience with claims like this is that they are false, whether through error, naivete, or fraud. If he's being sincere he likely means that he's written 350 prescriptions so far and to his knowledge things are great but he's not actually tracking the patients... The doctors I speak with directly tell me they see no obvious effect. The only way to tell is to compare it to something else in a randomized way... HCQ for mild disease is probably just as good as taking Vitamin D.”