French Researcher Claims 91% Success Rate with Chloroquine COVID-19 Treatment

The infectious disease specialist has probably waited for the best moment to unveil the results of his study conducted on covid-19 patients, treated with chloroquine.

Out of the 1,061 patients who went through his services and received an "exclusive treatment with hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin", 973, or 91.7% of them, achieved virological cure in ten days.

Before this study, the professor had also disregarded government guidelines by systematically testing and treating patients coming to his institute, after a preliminary contested trial conducted on 24 patients. In total, some 66,000 tests have been carried out at the IHU.

For Didier Raoult, the mortality rate is around 0.5% and the recovery rate is extremely high, he explained, stating that "comparable" results have been obtained "by other AP-HM services" and this, "independently of [his] team". In fact, 59,655 samples from 38,617 patients were tested from March 3 to April 9. Out of the 3,165 patients positive for covid-19, 1,061 were selected for the study. Their median age was 43.8 years and 46.4% were men, the same study notes, specifying that no cardiac toxicity has been observed.

However, a poor outcome was still observed for 46 patients, of whom ten were transferred to intensive care and five, aged 74 to 95, died. In this group, 31 had to be hospitalized ten days longer. As for the researcher, he assures that the HCQ-AZ combination, when started immediately after diagnosis, is a safe and effective treatment for covid-19, with a mortality rate of 0.5% in older patients.

It should be noted that the results of this study, which is not recognized by the entire medical community, reinforce Morocco’s decision to generalize the use of chloroquine.