Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Day 141: COVID-19 The HCQ+ Wars Continue
One of the effects of the politicization of disease is the tendency for someone to beclown themselves. When it’s more important to score ideological points than it is to do good science, you end up doing neither. The latest examples involve the Lancet and the New England Journal of Medicine.
Both respected medical periodicals published studies purporting to demonstrate how wrong President Trump was to offer that Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) might be a useful therapy in the treatment of COVID-19. They didn’t just publish studies, they rushed to do so, betraying how important it was to quickly neutralize the crazed speculations of the President. The World Health Organization listened and suspended ongoing trials of HCQ. The vaunted medical journals wanted to get into the game that the news media was already playing by pushing the story of the Arizona couple who had self-administered fish tank cleaner because one of the ingredients was chloroquine. Of course, it may well have been a poisoning by the wife who, being the only one of the two to survive the dosing, was also the only one left to describe the motives for and manner of ingesting the cleaner. We may yet get to see whether “Trump made me do it” is a valid defense to a murder charge.
The story of the Lancet and the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) truly appears to demonstrate the truth that when you want something in the worst possible way, you usually get it. They appear to have been taken in by a totally bogus outfit, Surgisphere, that seems to be selling whatever the database equivalent of vaporware is, or maybe just milking the investors in the manner of Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos. If you don’t know the story already here are the basics: Surgisphere purported to provide extensive hospitalization data to three researchers who crunched the numbers embedded in that data. The numbers now crunched, squeezed, spun and rinsed purported to prove that HCQ doesn’t work and creates a great risk of heart problems, including death–in short, taking HCQ for COVID-19 is worse than not taking it at all. How science works is someone publishes their work and methodology and then someone else tries to replicate the same result. The only way the replication can occur (and the results demonstrated to constitute science) is for someone else to have access to the same data. Turns out Surgisphere had an inconvenient problem. The hospitals whose data was supposedly analyzed had never heard of them. Therefore there is no credibility to the dataset that underlies the published study. Lancet and NEJM could have avoided egg on their face by doing a little due diligence about Surgisphere and verified with the hospitals that the data came from them. But, no, when a story is too good to check…well, you know the rest. The study has now been retracted by the three authors who did the number crunching — no word from the owner of Surgisphere.
Oh, and by the way, there is another study involving a potential COVID-19 medication, Ivermectin, that also relied on a Surgisphsere dataset. That study will likely be retracted as well. Ivermectin, an anti-parasite medication, may in fact be a promising therapy for COVID-19, but the study involving Surgisphere data will not be the one demonstrating its efficacy.
Not to be deterred by the Surgisphere fiasco NEJM has put out another critical study of HCQ, this time not alleging it is hazardous to take it for COVID-19, just that it doesn’t perform better than a placebo as a postexposure prophylaxis. That is, people who had actually been exposed to the SARS-CoV-2 and then took HCQ or a placebo, got sick at essentially the same rate. So were there any problems or issues with this study? Chris Martenson discusses the pros and cons of the study in the linked video between 7:40 and 35:05.
And, of course, there are a couple of other studies — one from India and one from Lebanon — that are showing good results with HCQ+. Martinson discusses those studies as well from 35:05 to 41:10. Martinson’s (current) bottom line:
The HCQ Wars will continue until there is no value in them for whatever agenda is being pursued.
[Note 1: I will be arbitrarily ending the daily COVID-19 posts on Day 150. It is clear now more than ever that this is not a public health crisis, it is a public policy crisis dressed in whatever garb best suits those that promote government control over our lives. That will be the constant battle of the remainder of my life. But it has nothing to do with the disease we labeled COVID-19.]
[Note 2: Links to all my COVID-19 posts can be found here.]
Published in General
Looks as if that might be the only reason to oppose its use, other than the fact President Trump suggested it might work.
Medical science advances. It has since my youth. But my opinion is not dependent, except in degree, on technology being static. Doctoring is still a complex, inexact, publicly misunderstood profession (Like law. And politics and business management. Also teaching, and sewage treatment, computer programming, economics, and…) and a doctor’s actions are still influenced by a massive tangle of considerations, not all of which are applied science.
In my youth, when a doctor prescribed a treatment, he usually thought it was the best treatment, or if he was influenced by non-medical factors, like public superstition (antibiotics kill cold viruses) or the neurosis of his patient, he usually thought there was at least some science-based benefit (the antibiotic might stop a secondary bacterial infection), and certainly no significant harm.
But of course we now know that a lot of what they thought was scientifically correct was not. That unfortunately is true even today, though! We just haven’t learned yet.
New non-medical influences on a doctors’ medical decisions, like Federal and insurance company regulations, and influences from large for-profit corporate “health-care industry” employers funded mostly by impersonal government and insurance bureaucracies–doctors were mostly self-employed–have cancelled part of the improvements in technology.
The first of these above behaviors might be considered carried out in good faith while the one we live with today is evil. As a matter of fact, the modern behavior of accepting money for behaviors known to hurt or harm fellow human beings is, in my mind, a defect in our approach to capitalistic economics, basically not a Christian behavior.
Obviously scant or anecdotal. Then again, I tend to not believe everything everyone says. The fact he pushed it did create that opposite and equal reaction, though didn’t it, kind of like one of Newton’s laws. The Social Theory of Medicine means we are all scientists now, and it appears everyone is becoming equal in abilities, ha ha. This is a work in progress, but I will say Trump took it, and if Fauci was thinking it could be dangerous, is probably disappointed.
Aspirin to prevent heart attack or stroke is off-label.