More evidence hydroxychloroquine works

It's not just SA. They were mentioning Sub-Saharian countries, several of them, although the segment focused more on South Africa. But while not sure, I do believe that SA favors HCQ for malaria. I saw another segment early on, on the use of HCQ in SA.

Yes, I appreciate that you keep an open mind on this. You're a good guy.

No, I wouldn't say the fake Surgisphere studies tainted them all. They only tainted... the Surgisphere studies. Others have absolutely nothing to do with them. Like I said, if there are bank robbers in the world, it doesn't mean we're all bank robbers. But I understand that people who aren't involved in medical research and don't know first hand that most studies are honest and ethical, will get suspicious after that despicable fiasco.

Why the surge of HCQ studies? It's not that; it's because *our* press reports more on those, for political reasons, but researchers are looking everywhere. The RECOVERY study I keep mentioning looked at HCQ but also lopinavir/ritonavir, and dexamethasone. You quoted yourself a study with 16 different treatments. I quoted one recently looking at 21 other alternatives. Remdesivir was looked at too. The protocol I keep talking about from the EVMS quotes (and recommends) a large number of other treatments (and mentions HCQ only briefly, to dismiss it). And so on and so forth. Most people who engaged in trials with HCQ wanted to find that it worked (so did I). Again, medical sciences are more neutral than you guys assume (unlike for example climate sciences). We'd all be DELIGHTED if it had worked. It was terribly disappointing that it didn't. This said, yes, there were more trials on HCQ than on anything else, and I think it's in part due to the political attention it gathered (not only here but in other countries too, like France, Brazil, and South Korea). You know, political attention = grants. Scientists typically can't pay for their own studies. They rely on grants. But this predominance of HCQ studies is shifting, now that we know that it doesn't work (and sorry, but we do know that).

Frankly I don't think that doctors and scientists are doing such a terrible job. It's a NOVEL coronavirus. It's a new disease, VERY different from the flu, SARS-1, and MERS. It took the world by storm. Things got hectic, as expected. But the progress in 8 months is simply AMAZING. I had never seen anything like that. A few months into it, we have the virus' genomic sequence, we have SEVERAL methods of vaccine development underway (the novel mRNA, adenovirus vector, protein fragment, inactivated virus, atenuated virus, etc.), we found already two medications with a proven effect (remdesivir, dexamethasone) and me made incredible progress in terms of treatment protocols with early coagulation, high flow 02 rather than invasive ventilation, modulation of the cytokine storm, etc. I actually had never seen the medico-scientific community react this well and this fast, in the past, for anything. It's quite remarkable.

It's just that in this day and age of social media, tweets, Facebook, political divisiveness, election year... the noise around it all got too loud. But the medico-scientific community? Doing just fine.

Oh boy, sorry for your relative, stuck in SA, although I can think of other places to be that are worse than a boat. I guess I envy people with boats. Never had one. Never, except for a brief period when I was too busy to do something about it anyway, lived in a city on the sea shore. Sure, there are lakes where I live but it's not the same thing.

 

Bush and Obama did all the heavy lifting.

Trump did all the heavy screwing up.

 

It’s something I’d have to discuss with my doctor. 4,000, out of the millions who have gotten it, isn’t really that high a number.

 

2.1%, 4th quarter GDP is not booming unless you agree that the economy was also booming under Obama's time? And the US GDP was falling quarter on quarter up to 31st Dec 2019, months before the pandemic came. The pandemic came just in time for Trump and you to blame something else on the collapsing economy he created

 

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2019014?query=featured_home

"Results of the randomized, controlled, open-label Phase III trial, which took place at more than two dozen sites in Brazil, were published in the New England Journal of Medicine on Thursday. The study randomized 667 patients to receive hydroxychloroquine or the drug plus the antibiotic azithromycin on top of standard of care or standard of care alone. When patients were measured on the seven-point ordinal scale of improvement in disease, those in the two hydroxychloroquine groups showed no improvement compared with patients who received standard of care alone. Moreover, those receiving hydroxychloroquine more frequently experienced Qt prolongation and elevation of liver enzymes."

 

Yes, there is plenty is research on this issue.
That’s why it should be a physician who decides whether to use the drug, not a politician.
Remdisivir is going to be priced at $3,000 per treatment. The maker of this drug uses politization of HCQ to take advantage of the de facto monopoly on the treatment.

 

In the early days it was necessary. There were no protocols, PPE was in even shorter supply, and people were not used to taking any kind of precautions.

I'll agree that indefinite shutdowns can't happen, but the first shutdowns were absolutely necessary.

 

When Lancet and NEJM promote Fake Science where are the more credible sources? Fauci? Birx?
Fake Science is now rampant.

 

Great reply.

One source indicated that patients could inhale a very low concentration of H2O2 for 4 minutes through a nebulizer safely several times a day. As you point out H2O2 is a very potent disinfectant.
Like you, I remember pouring it on scrapes and cuts as an alternative to iodine that hurt like hell.

 

Political Science encourages Fake Science.
HCQ is political in Brazil as well as in the US.

"Risch argued that, while hydroxychloroquine is not a universally effective treatment, it has shown marked and repeated success when used in appropriate cases and at appropriate points of disease progression.

"The crucial issues are (a) early treatment of (b) high-risk (c) outpatients with (d) HCQ plus zinc, [azithromycin], doxycycline etc. for (e) hospitalization or mortality outcomes," Risch said. "Dr. Fauci, in citing all of the studies without qualification, smeared all over points (a)-(e).

Risch said opponents of HCQ have been arguing that the drug "doesn't work on patients near death in ventilators and therefore we can't use it on healthier patients in outpatient settings."

"Why would you even entertain invoking a study on severely sick patients to bear on the efficacy of outpatients?" he asked."
JUST THE NEWS, POLITICS & POLICY, CORONAVIRUS, Yale epidemiologist: Dr. Fauci running 'misinformation campaign' against hydroxychloroquine, Accuses prominent doctor of harboring 'total anti-science viewpoint.', By Daniel Payne, July 29, 2020.
https://justthenews.com/politics-po...accuses-fauci-running-disinformation-campaign

 

They are not promoting fake science. They got briefly fooled by fake science (and I bet they are very much ashamed of it) but then they rapidly caught up and recalled the fake papers (within the week) That's not "promoting" anything (otherwise they wouldn't have recalled the papers). Again, this doesn't mean that all other papers on the topic are also fake.

I see no evidence that other papers on HCQ and COVID-19 are what you call "fake science." You know, the hallmarks of an spurious paper do exist, and that's precisely how the two fake Surgisphere ones were spotted; unfortunately and for a change (this is a very exceptional situation) not before they got briefly published. It is the very scientific community you're so suspicious of, that spotted the signs that the papers were fake, and alerted the Lancet and the NEJM. The result was immediate, with hundreds of scientists writing letters to The Lancet and NEJM, and the journals immediately saying "oops" and recalling the papers. It was not the general public, since the general public doesn't possess the specific knowledge that would equip them to notice the fraudulent issues with these two papers.

So, no other papers, for or against the use of HCQ for COVID-19, were spotted as fraudulent. And yes, the medico-scientific community *is* very good at spotting these things, as proven by the swift reaction to the two fake ones.

The FDA didn't base its ruling on HCQ on the fake paper. It specifically quotes a much more reliable paper, the Oxford University RECOVERY trial with 11,000 patients in 175 hospitals in the United Kingdom.

The Eastern Virginia Medical School protocol for the treatment of COVID-19, in its HCQ item, says that "despite the Lancet paper having been recalled, there is ample evidence from elsewhere that HCQ does not confer benefits to COVID-19 patients and is risky for this population, therefore we do not recommend it." I paraphrase from memory but if you look it up you'll see similar language there.

 

As a matter of fact, the one I'd be suspicious of, in this, would be Risch, not Fauci. While Fauci is a decades-long experienced Infectious Diseases specialist, Risch is a professor of Epidemiology at Yale's School of Public Health (not even their Medical School), not involved with virology, therapeutics, pharmacology, or infectious diseases from the treatment standpoint, unlike Fauci.

The way Risch went after this is, to me, highly suspicious, judging from his opinion piece published by Newsweek, which I read in its entirety. He starts by touting his own horn, going on and on about his credentials and accomplishments for a full paragraph (I was astonished; that's not the usual behavior of a man of science). Then he proceeds to begging all people to read his papers, quoting himself, also very unusual; it all sounded like self-promotion to me. Then he issues statements like "I know two doctors who are saving lives with HCQ" etc., which is even more mind-boggling to hear from the mouth of a supposed man of science, given that Science doesn't operate from anecdotes such as "I know someone who...", but favors large, objective, randomized, placebo-controlled trials.

Risch's almost entire argument is that most studies only addressed critical patients. Yes, he's got a point. It happened in part because the FDA's emergency authorization specified that it was only valid for hospital settings, that is, for hospitalized patients.

But what Risch apparently is not taking into consideration or not up-to-date or not willing to go there, is that ever since (and they were released before his Newsweek opinion piece) there were two additional and large randomized controlled trials, one that looked at HCQ for mild cases, and even one for the mildest possible situation you can think of, those who aren't even sick yet, that is, there was another RCT that looked at HCQ used as prophylactic for people exposed to the virus. Guess what? Both studies showed no efficacy of HCQ in these situations either, which completely destroy's Risch's point. My guess (sure, it's just a guess, maybe I'm wrong) is that Risch is not willing to go there because he is enjoying the notoriety his position brought to him, so he is not willing to look at the new evidence to the contrary (a.k.a. the Ostrich Strategy).

When he says Dr. Fauci is commenting without qualifications, that's a blatant lie. Dr. Fauci is actually MORE qualified than Risch who is not a specialist in therapeutics. When Risch says "we can't use it on healthier patients in outpatient settings" he is being very generous with the word "we" because *he* doesn't treat anybody. He is an epidemiologist. His papers on this were all quoting the work of others. And by the way, the FDA hasn't BANNED the medication. It simply withdrew the on-label indication. Physicians can still use it off-label as much as they want. So these misleading statements by Risch make me very suspicious of his agenda.

Now, there is ONE part in which I think he has a point: if there is still a niche for HCQ, like the EVMS protocol that I keep quoting says, is in adding Zinc to it. This possibility indeed hasn't been sufficiently studied. Unlike Risch says, HCQ + AZ has been extensively studied already and found to be ineffective and potentially more dangerous because AZ also causes QTc prolongation (the main mechanism behind HCQ's toxicity for COVID-19 patients). But regarding HCQ + Zinc, indeed there was a study that suggested benefits (sorry, I don't have the reference to it on me, right now, and can't go look for it; my lunch break is ending). It is a pity that the study did not include an arm with Zinc only, so we can't ascertain from that study if HCQ + Zinc worked because of the combination, or simply because Zinc alone works for COVID-19, with or without HCQ.

I think we need a randomized double-blind placebo-controlled trial structured like this:

Recruitment: outpatients recently infected who present mild symptoms or are asymptomatic
End points: Progression to moderate or severe disease with need for hospitalization (might throw in an objective indicator like Pulse Ox less than 93 because "need for hospitalization" may vary according to the whims of the ED physician and availability of beds)

1 arm with HCQ + a placebo matching the appearance of the Zinc capsule or lozenge, on top of management as usual
1 arm with HCQ + Zinc on top of management as usual
1 arm with Zinc + a placebo matching the appearance of the HCQ tablet, on top of management as usual
1 arm with the two placebos on top of management as usual

If we had a trial like that, we'd sort out if HCQ + Zinc are effective for mild cases.

Now, I'm still not optimistic, because it's not like many people don't already have adequate levels of Zinc in their bodies, so, sure, you can enhance this with exogenous Zinc (not the easiest thing to absorb, by the way), but I'd expect at least some positive result of HCQ as prophylaxis at least in the sub-set of those patients with good levels of Zinc, but what we saw with HCQ as prophylaxis was a failure. But still, yes, that's a piece of the puzzle that is still missing. On this, Professor Risch does have a point.

Again, sorry for the huge post... I can't help, I'm very verbose, but I swear that my intention is not Gish Gallop.

 

No. If medical experts find that an off label use of a medication is harmful, the physician is breaching his or her professional duty of care and should be disciplined.

 

The price of drugs in this country are absurd but that is because members of both parties get large political contributions from pharm companies.

A doctor should only prescribe what works for a particular illness. Studies have not shown hydrochloriquine to be beneficial to covid patients so no doctor should be using it.

 

Lancet and NEJM were caught red handed promoting the Fake Science attack on HCQ.

Fake Science + Fake News = Denial of Care = Mass Slaughter

"The Lancet paper that halted global trials of hydroxychloroquine for Covid-19 because of fears of increased deaths has been retracted after a Guardian investigation found inconsistencies in the data.

The lead author, Prof Mandeep Mehra, from the Brigham and Women’s hospital in Boston, decided to ask the Lancet for the retraction because he could no longer vouch for the data’s accuracy.

Related: How were medical journals and WHO caught out over hydroxychloroquine?

The journal’s editor, Richard Horton, said he was appalled by developments. “This is a shocking example of ***research misconduct*** in the middle of a global health emergency,” he told the Guardian."
THE GUARDIAN, Covid-19: Lancet retracts paper that halted hydroxychloroquine trials, By Sarah Boseley Health editor, June 5, 2020. (*** mine)
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/worl...-halted-hydroxychloroquine-trials/ar-BB152Zo4

 

Fauci, as opposed to Risch, has long record of ethical issues. There is no reason for anyone to trust him.

"Earlier this month, Dr. Anthony Fauci offered a pointed response to those who have challenged his stewardship of the pandemic as the nation's infectious disease chief: "I think you can trust me," he declared, citing his long record of service in government medicine.

That is exactly what Fauci's National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) agency declared years ago to foster children in New York, Illinois and elsewhere, many of whom were enrolled in an AIDS drug trial without the promised patient protections. An investigation concluded the NIAID's AIDS research division that reported to Fauci had failed in many cases to provide patient advocates to monitor the foster kids' health as promised, and in some cases, as required by law.

In other words, a trust was broken."
JUST THE NEWS, Fauci Files: Celebrated doc's career dotted with ethics, safety controversies inside NIH
Reinstated whistleblower says Fauci failed to get involved when problems emerged on his management watch., By Daniel Payne and John Solomon, July 23, 2020.
https://justthenews.com/accountabil...icans-should-trust-doctors-himself-his-career

 

I wouldn’t argue with that except I think even the first shutdown was a bit over zealous

 

I know. Nothing new in what you're telling me, that I didn't know before. Appalling. Disgusting. Even criminal in the figurative sense, I'd say (and I wish it could be called criminal in the literal sense, leading to prosecution; maybe it can, but I'm no lawyer to know the answer to that).

But like I said, two papers being fraudulent doesn't mean that the hundreds of other papers published on this are also fraudulent.

Answer me please: are you a bank robber? No? But look, I heard that some guy in South Dakota was caught robbing a bank. It MUST mean that YOU are also a bank robber, right? No, it doesn't? Yeah, actually I agree, it doesn't. So, equally, it doesn't mean that papers that have nothing to do with this fraudulent one, are also fraudulent.

And it wasn't The Guardian who debunked this. They are being self-serving in saying that (not the first time that The Guardian toots its own horn). The Lancet was immediately flooded with several messages from the scientific community since the paper came out. The Guardian did look into it but the scientists had already independently addressed The Lancet. Like I said and your quote confirms, the editor is appalled and ashamed. It's the fault of the peer-reviewers who gobbled it up without noticing the discrepancies. They were the ones who dropped the ball. I bet they will never peer-review a paper for the Lancet again, and like I said elsewhere, I believe that if he could get away with murder, Richard Horton would have boiled these peer-reviewers alive in hot oil. He must be flabbergasted because they inflicted irreparable harm to the journal's reputation.

I still think it's an exceptional and rare case and I still trust The Lancet. It's one of (or used to be, before this) top 5 most respected medical journals in the world, together with the BMJ, the NEJM (which was also a victim), the JAMA, and the Annals of Internal Medicine. Again, don't shoot the messenger. The Lancet and the NEJM didn't author these papers. They merely published them, then immediately retracted them when it became clear that they were fraudulent.

Do you have an idea of how many papers have been written on this? Several hundred. There were two fraudulent ones. Don't throw the baby out with the bath water.

Now, as for the mass murder charge, I don't think anybody got murdered due to research moving away from HCQ, because HCQ *still* doesn't work for COVID-19, as confirmed by several other reputable and non-fraudulent sources such as Oxford's RECOVERY trial. Someone wanted to discredit HCQ and engaged in overkill, as it was already falling apart on its own. Why it happened I don't know although I have my guesses. Some prosecutor's office should look into this Surgisphere and find out who really paid for this fraudulent study.

I don't even exclude a false flag operation... Because even though the study seems to aim at discrediting HCQ, the predictable backlash after inevitably the fraudulent nature of it surfaced, is that now all other studies concluding against HCQ got under knee-jerk suspicion in the court of public opinion... So one wonders who exactly Surgisphere was trying to benefit.

 

Sweden sniffed out the Fake Science.

"WHO lauds lockdown-ignoring Sweden as a 'model' for countries going forward
Just last month, the World Health Organization warned that lifting coronavirus lockdowns was the “last thing” countries needed. Shutdowns, it insisted, “are the best way to suppress and stop transmission.”

Or maybe not. Dr. Mike Ryan, WHO’s top emergencies expert, suggests learning from Sweden — which never shut down completely — as a *** “model”*** for battling the coronavirus."

"Ryan sees “lessons to be learned” from the way Sweden “has very much relied on its relationship with its citizenry and the ability and willingness of its citizens to implement self-distancing and self-regulate.”
NEW YORK POST, The World Health Organization’s Swedish flip-flop, By Post Editorial Board April 30, 2020. (*** mine)
https://nypost.com/2020/04/30/the-world-health-organizations-swedish-flip-flop/

After a 33% GDP crash the CCP Wuhan Virus Pandemic is surging again in lockdown California.
Vote Democrat for House Arrest!

 

Hundreds of other papers?
Two papers shown to be fraudulent makes people like myself who don’t trust the establishment skeptical of the rest. That’s just the way it is.
This Hydrox thing is starting to remind me of AGW in that the so called science seems politicized and study’s are conducted to prove a point of view instead of actually looking for facts.
Unfortunately far too many studies these days are conducted looking for evidence of a preconceived position rather than an unbiased search for truth.
News is no longer news and science is no longer science . The times we live in.

 

Physicians are still not allowed to prescribe HCQ in many states.

Yes, it is time for grand juries to examine everyone involved in using Fake Science to restrict access to effective life saving treatment during a pandemic.

The Fauci/Birx demand for double blind studies to confirm the effectiveness of HCQ is especially odd during what has been described for years as an ongoing science "replication crisis"..

"[A]fter confessing to spiking samples for an HIV vaccine experiment, Dong Pyou-Han—whose case we mentioned in last year’s retractions roundup—was sentenced to nearly five years in prison and ordered to pay back millions of dollars in grant funding. It’s not the only time we’ve seen felony counts for fraudsters, but the sentence makes it the most remarkable one. (He’s appealing the decision.)"
THE SCIENTIST, The Top 10 Retractions of 2015, A look at this year’s most memorable retractions, By Retraction Watch | December 23, 2015.
https://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/44895/title/The-Top-10-Retractions-of-2015/

 

Well, then, in this case, I'll trust neither. If Fauci can't be trusted (and indeed I profoundly disliked his lie about masks not being needed outside of healthcare settings), I don't think I can trust Risch either, given the self-promoting tone and the tooting of his own horn, and the disregard for two recent placebo-controlled studies that FRONTALLY contradict his whole point.

You know, other than trusting pundits and even experts or politicians, I think we should better trust the true researchers who are looking into this, with careful consideration given to their disclosures of funding sources (big pharma related? or funded by national agencies like the NIH here and the NHS in the UK?), their affiliations (major reputable university versus some unknown operation), the soundness of the methodology they used, the ability to show that the work was peer-reviewed (there's been a lot of online only, ahead-of-print, non-peer reviewed works being quoted around by journalists), and the internal coherence of the conclusions reached.

With a careful look, there are hints on whether or not a paper is legit. I'd go with that any day other than what pundits say on TV or the lay press. Just the willingness of a professor of Epidemiology to try and attract this much attention to himself going to the lay press to promote himself, while being of a specialty that doesn't treat illness, and while being a member of a faculty that while belonging to a prestigious university, is not even the faculty of their medical school, makes me take it all with a BIG grain of salt.

 

Agreed that Science has been way more tainted now than in the past and it is regrettable.

But this is another reason why I look at randomized controlled trials more than cohort studies, retrospective database reviews, etc. It's because it's a lot harder to cheat in RCTs since by definition and design the researchers DON'T KNOW who is taking the active medication and who is taking the placebo until the end point outcomes are collected and recorded. Only then, the sealed envelopes showing who is who are opened. The integrity of the data also benefit from the overlook and review of something called Data and Safety Monitoring Board which an organization running a medication clinical trial is required to have.

How would an RCT be conducted to prove a point of view? The researches don't know who is taking the medication. The patients don't know who is taking the medication. The research assistants doing the scoring don't know who is taking the medication. It's only after everything is done that, under the supervision and oversight of the DSMB, the envelopes are opened and the results are separated into active and placebo groups.

So there is no way to inject a bias beforehand.

What "so-called science"? Two fraudulent papers? Yes, there's been hundreds of others. Me alone I've read at least 150 since this all started. There are many more.

Look, this is not highly subjective and controversial like climate models in AGW papers. It's pretty simple:

Get two similar groups of patients, randomized. Blindly give them either the active treatment or placebo. Collect the results. Open the envelopes. See who fared better, if at all. It's really fool-proof.

Again, please understand that the two fraudulent papers weren't RCTs. They merely retrospectively pretended to look at databases (actually they were fake databases). That, anybody can do, and write it up, and present it for publication, and if the peer reviewers aren't smart enough or careful enough, maybe they'll fool everybody FOR A SHORT TIME because the chicanery will be apparent (like in this case it was, and the papers were retracted almost immediately).

Remember the saying that you can fool some people all the time, all the people for some time, but you can't fool all the people all the time? That's what happened to the two fraudulent papers. They managed to fool a few people (the peer reviewers) but soon enough they got caught.

What "establishment"? Most medical scientists are aloof lab rats who aren't that interested in anything that doesn't fall under their narrow fields of specialization.

Anyway, what can I say? I understand that the lay public will be suspicious, and I can't stop that (which is why fraud like the Lancet's case angers me). But it is quite unfair to suspect reputable and ethical people just because some rogue group managed - for a very short time - to take advantage of the system.

 

Great, excellent. I hope his appeal has failed and I hope he is rotting in some prison as we speak.

I want an investigation of this Surgisphere rogue group. We need to learn who paid for the fraudulent studies. I don't have a political preference on this. I think whoever did it deserves punishment. If it's a group of Democrats trying to discredit Trump, they deserve to be voted out of office. If it's a group of Big Pharma companies trying to undermine a cheap drug in favor of more expensive ones, they deserve to face criminal charges. It's a false flag operation to ultimately discredit all other studies that have concluded for HCQ's inefficacy and it can be sourced to politicians or pharma companies, those deserve to be voted out too and be charged with crimes. In the middle of a pandemic that is killing people, this is the most callous and irresponsible behavior you can think of.

 

You could well be right in your assessment of studies but speaking as a lay person I have lost all faith in the scientific community in large part due to the AGW hoax. Consider my and others skepticism towards academia a direct unintended result of this.
At one time I trusted news and science but that has all gone out the window as both have become so politicized. It's an unfortunate reality but its reality.