(NewsNation) — Nearly 17,000 people across six countries may have died because they took hydroxychloroquine during the first wave of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020, according to a study by French researchers.
The immunosuppressive drug used to treat and prevent malaria was prescribed to some of the first patients hospitalized with COVID-19.
The study claims hydroxychloroquine was prescribed to patients with COVID-19 despite “low-level evidence.”
The use of hydroxychloroquine was associated with an 11% increase in the mortality rate in a meta-analysis of randomized trials, according to research published in Biomedicine & Pharmacotherapy.
Former President Donald Trump was among those who first endorsed its use to treat the coronavirus. From March 1 to April 30, 2020, Donald Trump made 11 tweets about unproven therapies and mentioned these therapies 65 times in White House briefings, especially touting hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine, according to the National Library of Medicine.
But Trump was far from the only figure who believed it may have had merit treating COVID.
Doctors and pharmacists from more than a half-dozen large health care systems in New York, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Ohio, Washington and California told Reuters in 2020 that they were routinely using hydroxychloroquine on patients hospitalized with COVID-19. At the same time, several said they had seen no evidence that the drug had any effect on the virus.
