EHHHHHHH the independent isn't the best and most objective "news" organization but I'll bite. I assume the study in question is
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/a ... 3X2030505X
If you read the study they are doing a meta analysis of 17 studies, only 3 of those studies were randomized studies. If one of those studies was the study done with the veterans hospital, that one was already debunked. They're also throwing in published and unpublished studies into the data mix.
This concerns me.
Study quality
Risk of bias was assessed with ROBIN-I for non-randomised studies (n=26) and Rob2 for RCT (n=3) (Figures S1-S2). Three RCT had some concerns [39,40,51] and one interventional non-randomized study had critical risk of bias [24]. Among the observational studies, fifteen articles had a moderate or serious risk of bias [13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18,41,42,44,46, 47, 48,56,58] and ten studies had a critical risk of bias [23,43,49,50,52, 53, 54,59,60,65]. Eleven observational studies did not report adjusted effect sizes to control confusion and selection bias [23,24,43,44,49,53,54,57,59,60,65]. Quality of studies was lowered by the lack of information about the assignment of treatment, the time between start of follow-up and start of intervention), some unbalanced co-intervention with other antiviral and antibiotic drugs and imbalance between groups for confounders such as comorbidities and age.
So going back to the first thing i said, out of those 17 studies they used, only 3 weren't at risk of serious bias. Not shocked, that's what happens when you don't randomize your n.
This is telling, the hypothesis of the study at the very beginning was 26/27%
Hydroxychloroquine and mortality
After excluding studies with critical bias, the pooled RR for COVID-19 mortality was 0.83 (95%CI: 0.65-1.06, n=17 studies) indicating no significant association between HCQ and COVID-19 mortality (Figure 2). Under the hypothesis of having a baseline mortality risk of 26% (based on ISARIC WHO CCP-UK cohort [29]), these pooled relative risk values would correspond to a non-significant risk difference of -4.4% [29] (Table 1). There was a significant subgroup difference between RCT and non-randomized studies (Pheterogeneity between = 0.03) with respectively RRRCT=1.09 (95%CI: 0.97-1.24) and RRnon-randomized= 0.79 (95%CI: 0.60-1.04) (Figure 2). Among observational studies with a moderate risk of bias, we found no association between HCQ and mortality RRmoderate bias=1.03 (95%CI: 0.91-1.17, I2=0%, n=7 studies) with no subgroup heterogeneity (Table S4, Figure S3). Results remained nonsignificant with influence analysis (Figure S4). The Bayesian meta-analysis led to similar results with a pooled RR for mortality of 0.93 (95%CI: 0.72-1.14, n=17 studies) (Table S5, Figure S5). In sensitivity analysis, after inclusion of studies with critical risk of bias, the global RR was marginally not significant 0.80 (95%CI: 0.65-1.00) (Table S6).
Conclusion
Hydroxychloroquine alone was not associated with reduced mortality in hospitalized COVID-19 patients but the combination of hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin significantly increased mortality.
