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By Kate Plummer
Senior US News Reporter
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A drug then-President Donald Trump promoted during the coronavirus pandemic has been linked to thousands of potential excess deaths, according to a new study.
During the COVID pandemic, Trump repeatedly espoused the so-called benefits of hydroxychloroquine, an anti-malaria drug that is also often used to treat rheumatoid arthritis and lupus, as a treatment for the virus and said he had himself been taking it.
At the time, small studies suggested hydroxychloroquine could be beneficial but it had not been proven that it was effective in treating coronavirus. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) gave the drug an emergency use authorization on March 28, 2020, and began clinical trials.
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Subsequent larger studies, including one by the New England Journal of Medicine, found it had no benefit on coronavirus and resulted in a significant increase in the risk of death. The FDA revoked the emergency use authorization on June 15, 2020.
A new study by French researchers has found that nearly 17,000 people may have died after being prescribed hydroxychloroquine in hospitals during the first wave of COVID.
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Newsweek reached out to representatives for Trump via email for comment.
The research, published in the February issue of Biomedicine & Pharmacotherapy, estimated that some 16,990 people across six countries died as a result of being prescribed hydroxychloroquine while hospitalized with the illness from March to July 2020. The countries studied were France, Belgium, Italy, Spain, Turkey and the United States.
The majority of these deaths involved patients from the U.S., with 12,739 deaths. In Spain there were 1,895 deaths, in Italy 1,822, in Belgium 240, in France 199, and in Turkey 95. The toxicity of the drug was due in part to cardiac side effects. Hydroxychloroquine is known to have side effects like heart arrhythmia and muscle weakness.
Researchers analyzed other studies that tracked hospitalizations and exposure to the drug relative risk from the drug.
The researchers said that due to a lack of data from most countries involved, the actual number of deaths could be more or less with a range between 3,000 and 30,000.
But worldwide, the figure could be much higher if data from other countries had been collated.
In April 2020, Trump talked hydroxychloroquine up on Fox News and claimed, without evidence, that areas where malaria is a constant threat had not had large outbreaks of coronavirus because of hydroxychloroquine.
"I haven't seen bad!" Trump said. "I've not seen bad. One thing that we do see is that people are not gonna die from it. So if somebody is in trouble, you take it, I think. I would."
In May 2020, he also said he had been using it to prevent coronavirus.
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