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A group of 37 experts, Brazilian, American, and British, will unveil this Saturday, the 22nd, an open letter in order to dispute the findings of clinical trials published in the major scientific publications on the early treatment of the Covid-19 with hydroxychloroquine.

According to the authors of the letter, the data from randomized trials on early treatment in non-hospitalised patients published up to now show that, in fact, there are positive effects in the groups that received the treatment, especially in patients at higher risk such as the elderly...

But, as the majority of the sample in the study was made up of young men with no comorbidities, they were statistically inconclusive, and, therefore, there is still an uncertainty is a reasonable of the results. According to them, the work claimed that the treatment had no effect compared to placebo. “This is an error of interpretation in the statistical tests, it is well-known, and is explained in most textbooks for graduate students in the area,” said Watanabe. “In a paper published in Nature last year stated that about 51% of the work on clinical trials, this type of result, conclusions that are not correct.” ...

In the analysis of the authors of the letter, if hydroxychloroquine is administered on the day of exposure to the virus, for example, the reduction of people with symptoms that could be up to 72 per cent, but the effect would diminish the more time it takes for them to start the treatment. “We are not saying that medication is the cure to the disease. We are... stating precisely what are the positive effects of the hydroxychloroquine, presented in the figures, no more, no less”, says Cláudia Paiva of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.