Gloved hands holding up hydroxychloroquine, which so far has no evidence of effectiveness against Covid-19. | John Phillips/Getty Images

There’s little evidence that hydroxychloroquine helps Covid-19 patients, but there were problems with the study suggesting it’s actively deadly.

The Lancet, one of the world’s leading journals in medical science, has retracted a paper finding that the malaria drugs chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine, touted by President Trump as Covid-19 treatments, increase mortality in patients.

To be clear, there is, as of this writing, little evidence that chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine are effective treatments for Covid-19, in spite of their popularity as an “alternative remedy” that even Trump himself says he has taken as a prophylactic. Research on the topic is ongoing; on Wednesday, a major randomized controlled trial of hydroxychloroquine as a Covid-19 prevention drug found no benefits.

But three of the Lancet paper’s four authors, Mandeep Mehra,