A massive worldwide study of coronavirus patients has found that the malaria drug that President Trump has relentlessly promoted during the pandemic poses a significant risk of death, the Washington Post reports. Trump has placed so much faith in the supposed benefits of hydroxychloroquine that he has said he is taking it himself; he also said he had taken a dose of the antibiotic azithromycin although that was not mentioned in a White House physician’s note this week. The study published Friday in the medical journal the Lancet, shows that this cocktail of drugs—hydroxychloroquine plus a macrolide antibiotic such as azithromycin—is linked to a 45 percent increased risk of death and a more than quadrupled risk of a serious heart arrhythmia. The study looked at 96,000 hospitalized virus patients around the world and found that, overall, those given hydroxychloroquine had a 34 percent increase in risk of mortality and a 137 percent increased risk of a serious heart arrhythmia. “It’s one thing not to have benefit, but this shows distinct harm,” said Eric Topol, director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute. “If there was ever was hope for this drug, this is the death of it.”
