Hydroxychloroquine could have caused 17,000 deaths during Covid, study finds

Early January of 2024, Americans learned about the publication of an article from Elsevier’s Journal of Biomedicine and Pharmacotherapy overseen by Dr. Danyelle Townsend, a professor at the University of South Carolina College of Pharmacy’s Department of Drug Discovery and Biomedical Sciences.As Editor-in-Chief, Dr. Townsend reviewed, approved, and published the article titled: “ Deaths induced by compassionate use of hydroxychloroquine during the first COVID-19 wave: An estimate.”

The article was always a hypothesized estimate of people that might have died, but now even that estimate has been retracted.The reason for the retraction was that the Belgian dataset that was one of the bases for the piece was found to be “ unreliable” (but in reality was fraudulent).

The article also repeatedly referenced the New England Journal of Medicine’s 2020 RECOVERY trial. The RECOVERY trial is well known to be a deeply flawed study which, in addition to implementing late treatment in severely ill Covid patients, used extremely high doses of HCQ.