A new study shows that after U.S. hospitals reduced their treatments of COVID-19 patients with convalescent plasma therapy, more COVID-19 deaths occurred. The treatments involve using antibody-rich blood from recovered COVID-19 patients and were primarily administered in the summer of 2020, resulting in the convalescent plasma treatment of over 500,000 COVID patients by the spring of 2021.
Medical professionals began to discontinue the use of convalescent plasma treatments late in 2020 when several clinical trials showed no apparent benefit. Scientists say those studies were flawed, pointing out that “many of the clinical trials with negative results had used plasma — mainly considered an antiviral treatment — relatively late in the course of COVID-19, when patients may have been too ill to benefit, and when the disease was driven mainly by immune-related responses rather than the coronavirus itself,” a Newswise press release said.
The analysis by researchers at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, in collaboration with researchers at Michigan State University and the Mayo Clinic, suggests the reduction of convalescent plasma treatments could be behind more than 29,000 excess COVID-19 deaths from November 2020 to February 2021.
In addition, the analysis suggests that the use of plasma on the whole — even though it was limited — prevented about 95,000 deaths through early March of 2021. Convalescent plasma is still available for use and remains under FDA Emergency Use Authorization.
SOURCE: Newswise June 7, 2021