"Hundreds" of Dutch died from hydroxychloroquine side effects during Covid pandemic

In the early phase of the coronavirus pandemic, several hundred Dutch people died from the side effects of hydroxychloroquine, the malaria drug that seemed promising against COVID-19. Physician-microbiologist Marc Bonten of Utrecht University said this to the Volkskrant based on a new analysis by French scientists of the deaths caused by the drug in various countries.

It is impossible to say exactly how many people died in the Netherlands from the side effects of hydroxychloroquine, Bonten said. “It is, if you want to put it dramatically, a plane full of people,” he said. “Yet I don’t think you can blame anyone for this. It was the first wave, the ICUs were full, people were dying, we were empty-handed. And laboratory research showed that this drug might work.”

Of the COVID-19 patients treated in Dutch hospitals, an estimated 10,000 or so were given hydroxychloroquine, and about 2,000 ultimately died, Bonten said. “If we had not used hydroxychloroquine, there would probably have been about 200 fewer,” he said, based on a British study from June 2020 that showed that people who received hydroxychloroquine had an 11 percent greater risk of death than COVID-19 patients not treated with the malaria drug.

There is no way of knowing whether the drug was also harmful to people who were not in the hospital, Bonten added. Not least because these often involved younger, healthy people who sometimes took hydroxychloroquine as a preventative measure. “A completely different group than hospital patients for whom this seemed like the last salvation.”

Worldwide, at least 17,000 people died from the side effects of hydroxychloroquine in the first phase of the pandemic, according to the French scientists. They stressed that this was likely an underestimate because they only had data from a few countries. The study relied on officially published figures from Belgium, Turkey, France, Italy, and the United States of America from the first months of the pandemic.

When the coronavirus reached Europe in February 2020, hydroxychloroquine was one of the drugs used as an emergency intervention for seriously ill patients. That stopped on 5 June 2020, after the large British comparison between COVID-19 patients treated and not treated with hydroxychloroquine.

According to Bonten, the French study shows the importance of rapid investigation in an emergency situation. “If we had not had those British figures as early as June, the damage could have been much greater,” he told the newspaper.