Hypertension Drugs Are Probably Not Making COVID-19 Worse

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Yesterday I passed along news of a controversy concerning hypertension and COVID-19. The question was simple: does hypertension make COVID-19 more deadly, or is it hypertension drugs that make it more deadly? A couple of new studies out of China suggest that it really is hypertension after all:

One study looked at 362 patients with high blood pressure treated at Central Hospital of Wuhan, the city where the initial outbreak occurred. It found no difference between those on the drugs and those not in terms of the severity of the disease and whether a patient survived or died, researchers from the hospital report online April 23 in JAMA Cardiology. The other study followed 1,128 COVID-19 patients with hypertension from nine hospitals in Hubei Provence, where Wuhan is located. It found that the mortality rate was lower for the 188 on the drugs, an international research team reports online April 17 in Circulation Research.

The new studies provide reassurance that the drugs “are not associated with harm in patients with COVID-19, as some had suspected,” says cardiologist Scott Solomon of Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston. But without randomized controlled trials, in which patients are randomly chosen to take a drug or a placebo, “it will be very difficult to get at the truth” of exactly what impact the drugs have, he says.

Sure, we would all like a bunch of randomized controlled trials, but we’re not going to get them in the middle of a pandemic. Observational studies like these are the best we’re going to do, and properly conducted they should provide pretty reliable results. My only hesitation here is that a lot of studies and projections based on the Wuhan outbreak have later turned out to be unique to Wuhan. I can’t think of any reason this should be true for hypertension drugs, but COVID-19 is a weird disease. You never know.

For now, though, this is the best we’ve got. Talk to your doctor, of course, but it looks like hypertension drugs are probably in the clear.

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

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