Treatment with controversial anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine may have reduced deaths in hospitalized COVID-19 patients, according to results of a peer-reviewed study by a group of New York researchers.

Dr. Takahisa Mikami and his team at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York, NY, analyzed the outcomes of 6493 patients who had laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 in the New York City metropolitan area, according to the article appearing in the Journal of General Internal Medicine^[1]Mikami, T., Miyashita, H., Yamada, T. et al. Risk Factors for Mortality in Patients with COVID-19 in New York City. J GEN INTERN MED (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11606-020-05983-z

The researchers found that hydroxychloroquine decreased mortality hazard ratio by 47% percent.

This latest study linking hydroxychloroquine with better COVID-19 outcomes comes in the heels of another peer-reviewed study that showed similar results.

A team at Henry Ford Health System in southeast Michigan reported in the International Journal of Infectious Diseases^[2] Treatment with Hydroxychloroquine, Azithromycin, and Combination in Patients Hospitalized with COVID-19 Arshad, SamiaNauriyal, Varidhi et al. International Journal of Infectious Diseases, Volume 0, Issue https://www.ijidonline.com/article/S1201-9712(20)30534-8/fulltext Thursday that a study of 2,541 hospitalized patients found that those given hydroxychloroquine were much more likely to survive the novel coronavirus.

Use of hydroxychloroquine, a drug heavily promoted by US President Donald Trump, came under intense criticism after an article last month in the prestigious medical journal The Lancet raised alarms about the safety of the drug for treating COVID-19.

The study prompted the World Health Organization to halt hydroxychloroquine trials to treat the novel coronavirus.

The Lancet subsequently retracted^[3]https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)31180-6/fulltext the study after the data used for the analysis came into question.

The W.H.O, whose leadership has come under heavy criticism for the handling of the coronavirus pandemic, has refused to restart the hydroxychloroquine trials despite the retraction.