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How coronavirus turned medical research into a free-for-all
Source: The New Statesman
BY SAMUEL HORTI
29 APRIL 2020
What the story of hydroxychloroquine tells us about the dangers of fast-track science, and shows how any piece of research can be made to fit a political narrative.
On 20 March, a group of French scientists claimed to have shown that hydroxychloroquine – a drug commonly used for malaria, rheumatoid arthritis and lupus – could be used to treat patients with Covid-19. They recommended, based on the results of their study, that doctors give Covid-19 patients the drug in combination with the common antibiotic azithromycin to “cure their infection and… curb the spread of Covid-19 in the world”.
This trial was fraught with problems. It was an “open label” trial, meaning patients knew whether they were receiving the treatment or not, and the subjects were not allocated to the two groups randomly, as should happen. The editor-in-chief of the journal that published the research was also one of the paper’s co-authors, which is highly unusual. The normally lengthy peer-review process, during which experts scrutinise research and assess suitability for publication, took 24 hours. And in February, Didier Raoult, the microbiologist leading the study, had co-authored an article hyping up the potential of the drug before it was clinically tested. “The whole thing stinks,” says Lawrence Young, a virologist and pro-dean at the University of Warwick.
The results, too, were suspect. The 20 patients who were treated and recorded as having completed the study fared better than other subjects – but this group originally had 26 patients. Six dropped out; one left the hospital, another felt too ill to carry on, three were sent to intensive care, and one patient died. In any other year, the study would have been dismissed out of hand.
Three days later, a 61-year-old woman from Arizona noticed that a substance she used to remove parasites from her pet fish contained chloroquine phosphate, the same compound found in anti-malarial drugs. She and her husband, 68, mixed the chemical into their drinks. Within a few hours she was in a critical condition and her husband had died. They had drunk the powerful chemical because, as she later told NBC News from hospital, they were “afraid of getting sick” from coronavirus.
This trial was fraught with problems. It was an “open label” trial, meaning patients knew whether they were receiving the treatment or not, and the subjects were not allocated to the two groups randomly, as should happen. The editor-in-chief of the journal that published the research was also one of the paper’s co-authors, which is highly unusual. The normally lengthy peer-review process, during which experts scrutinise research and assess suitability for publication, took 24 hours. And in February, Didier Raoult, the microbiologist leading the study, had co-authored an article hyping up the potential of the drug before it was clinically tested. “The whole thing stinks,” says Lawrence Young, a virologist and pro-dean at the University of Warwick.
The results, too, were suspect. The 20 patients who were treated and recorded as having completed the study fared better than other subjects – but this group originally had 26 patients. Six dropped out; one left the hospital, another felt too ill to carry on, three were sent to intensive care, and one patient died. In any other year, the study would have been dismissed out of hand.
Three days later, a 61-year-old woman from Arizona noticed that a substance she used to remove parasites from her pet fish contained chloroquine phosphate, the same compound found in anti-malarial drugs. She and her husband, 68, mixed the chemical into their drinks. Within a few hours she was in a critical condition and her husband had died. They had drunk the powerful chemical because, as she later told NBC News from hospital, they were “afraid of getting sick” from coronavirus.
Read more: https://www.newstatesman.com/science-tech/coronavirus/2020/04/how-coronavirus-turned-medical-research-free-all
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