France’s flirtation with hydroxychloroquine as a coronavirus fix is coming to an end.

The country’s public health agency advised Tuesday against using hydroxychloroquine outside of clinical trials. Shortly after that, the national medicines regulator suspended its use in clinical trials.

The moves follow the Lancet’s publication on Friday of a large observational study casting doubt on the benefit of hydroxychloroquine and another malaria drug, chloroquine, for COVID-19 patients. It also found an increased risk of heart problems and death.

Health Minister Olivier Véran had asked the National Council for Public Health (HCSP) over the weekend to consider whether he should revise France’s emergency use authorization to prescribe hydroxychloroquine to hospitalized COVID-19 patients.

Furthermore, the drugs regulator ANSM announced Tuesday that new patients should not be enrolled in the 16 clinical trials of hydroxychloroquine currently underway in France.

That echoes the World Health Organization’s announcement Monday that it would temporarily suspend the hydroxychloroquine part of its global Solidarity trial amid a safety review.

Europe’s hype around hydroxychloroquine originated in France, where a small, non-randomized trial in the Marseille clinic of doctor Didier Raoult claimed to have promising results. The U.S. also granted emergency authorization for COVID-19 in March, and U.S. Donald Trump said last week that he’s taking it to prevent the disease.

In a video posted Monday, Raoult stood by his findings.

“How can one messy study done with ‘big data’ change what we see?” he said.

Five of Europe’s biggest countries criticized Silicon Valley on Tuesday for “imposing” standards on coronavirus-tracking technology, arguing that the EU needs to wean itself off dependency on foreign tech companies.

In a joint op-ed published in several languages, the top officials in charge of digital affairs from Germany, France, Italy, Spain and Portugal accused the firms of neglecting the right of democratically-elected governments to have the final say over how such tools should be developed.

The firms were not named. Apple and Google helped to develop the technology underpinning many coronavirus-tracking apps.

“We believe that this attempt … is a missed opportunity and the wrong signal when it comes to promoting open cooperation between governments and the private sector,” the officials wrote. “States and companies must work together to recover from this pandemic and to become stronger, more cooperative and more digital than ever.”

The joint publication comes as countries around the globe are about to roll out smartphone applications to trace potential new infections by analyzing Bluetooth signals between phones.

Many of these programs will be based on an approach championed by Google and Apple, whose operating systems run on about 99 percent of smartphones globally.

The tech giants’ approach often went against other proposals initially put forward by policymakers, which were dropped after the two companies announced they would partner on software which would allow apps to trace potential infections even while running in the background of people’s smartphones.

Germany, for instance, changed course and ditched a German-led proposal in favor of that promoted by Google and Apple in April, which has delayed the rollout of the app by several weeks, if not months, according to officials involved in the process.

In the op-ed, the countries stress that recent experience has illustrated the importance of Europe to boost its “digital sovereignty, [which] is the foundation for Europe to be competitive.”

“It must be our aim to set the digital standards in the globalized world in order to determine the use and production of applications, especially in the field of key technologies, independently of individual companies or economic sectors,” they write.

LONDON — A junior minister in Boris Johnson’s government resigned on Tuesday over top aide Dominic Cummings’ alleged breach of the U.K.’s lockdown guidelines, saying he could not “in good faith” tell his constituents that the advisers’ actions were justifiable.

Douglas Ross, under secretary of state for Scotland, wrote to Johnson saying that the public reaction to reports of Cummings’ 260-mile drive from London to Durham in late March demonstrated that the adviser’s “interpretation of the government guidance was not shared by the vast majority of people who have done what the government asked.”

His is the first resignation in connection with the issue and will increase pressure on Johnson, who has faced calls to sack Cummings from opposition parties and from at least 20 Conservative MPs.

Ross added: “I have constituents who didn’t get to say goodbye to loved ones; families who could not mourn together; people who did not visit sick relatives because they followed the guidance of the government. I cannot in good faith tell them they were all wrong and one senior adviser to the government was right.”

Johnson has stood by Cummings since the first reports of his actions on Friday evening. On Monday, Cummings said he did not regret his actions and Johnson reiterated that he believed his adviser had acted legally and in the best interests of his family.

A No. 10 spokesman said: “The prime minister would like to thank Douglas Ross for his service to government and regrets his decision to stand down as parliamentary under secretary of state for Scotland.”