After promoting hydroxychroloquine as a treatment for Covid-19, Didier Raoult affirms that “it no longer works on the Omicron variant”. A point of view which joins that of the French health authorities and the UN.
Didier Raoult disavows – partially – hydroxychloroquine. The man who had widely promoted this drug as a treatment for Covid-19 in 2020 backtracked on Twitter on May 4. “Currently I agree with the ANSM (National Agency for the Safety of Medicines and Health Products, Editor’s note) on hydroxychloroquine against Covid”, said the infectious disease specialist.
“It no longer works on the 2022 Omicron variant, the concentrations needed to inhibit Omicron are 50 times greater than for the other variants.”
Omicron is the only variant identified in sequencing tests since March 2022, according to the data of Public Health France.
“The concentration of hydroxychloroquine in the blood with our protocol was three times the effective dose for the old variants. It is no longer so for Omicron. This is science not dogma”, added the former head of the Institut Hospitalo-Universitaire (IHU) in Marseille. Hydroxycholoroquine is generally used in the context of inflammatory and autoimmune diseases.
Didier Raoult left his post as director of the IHU Méditerranée Infection on September 1, pushed out after a process started a year earlier. He is also no longer a university professor-hospital practitioner at Aix-Marseille University and the University Hospitals of Marseille.
Hydroxychloroquine has never proven its effectiveness against Covid-19
If Didier Raoult does not completely disavow his previous statements, in an opinion published in early April, the National Medicines Safety Agency (ANSM), recalled that “the data published to date do not support a clinical benefit of hydroxychloroquine, whether or not associated with azithromycin, in the treatment of Covid -19, regardless of its context of use”.
“They even show that this use is harmful for the patient due to increased exposure to adverse effects on cardiac function”, underlined this establishment dependent on the Ministry of Health.
The World Health Organization does not say otherwise on his site: she claims not to 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 this ventilation” but “may increase the risk of cardiac arrhythmia, blood and lymphatic disorders, kidney damage, as well as liver disorders and failure,” the UN agency warned.
