Originally Posted by GoodLife
Perhaps you've heard about the recent VA study on hydroxychloroquine. The MSM jumped on it with blaring headlines proclaiming failure and more deaths. It's no secret why they did.
There's also another big player in the war against hydroxychloroquine, Big Pharma.
HCQ has no patent, is made all over the world, and is dirt cheap compared to the designer drugs they make billions from. Gilead's remdesivir is one of the covid 19 drugs being touted, and they might price it at $1000 per day like they did with Solvadi for Hep C
So politics and billions of dollars are at play.
You might think that after that VA study proclaiming death and failure that Doctors all over the world would stop using it. Actually no, in fact they are still using it at the VA
Responding to the results during an appearance on MSNBC, Secretary of Veterans Affairs Wilkie said, “That’s an observational study. It’s not a clinical study. It was done on a small number of veterans; sadly, those of whom were in the last stages of life, and the drug was given to them.”
The drug “has been working on middle-age and younger veterans,” Wilkie added. By that, he meant that it was “stopping the progression of” COVID-19"
Dr Didier Raoult of France, who has treated over 1000 coronavirus patients, responded to the VA study with this letter.
In the current period, it seems that passion dominates rigorous and balanced scientific analysis and may lead to scientific misconduct. The article by Magagnoli et al. (Magagnoli, 2020) is an absolutely spectacular example of this. Indeed, in this work, it is concluded, in the end, that hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) would double the mortality in patients with COVID with a fatality rate of 28% (versus 11% in the NoHCQ group), which is extraordinarily hard to believe. The analysis of the data shows two major biases, which show a welling to be convinced before starting the work :
The first is that lymphopenia is twice as common in the HCQ groups (25% in the HCQ, 31% in the HCQ+AZ group versus 14% in the no HCQ group, p =.02) and there is an absolute correlation between lymphopenia (<0.5G/L) and fatality rate, which is well known (Tan, 2020) and confirmed here : 28% deaths, 22% and 11% in the HCQ, HCQ+AZ and No HCQ group, respectively. Lymphopenia is the most obvious criterion of patient severity (in our cohort, lymphocytes in dead individuals (n=22, mean ± standard deviation, 0.94 ± 0.45), versus in the living (n=2405, 1.79 ± 0.84, p < .0001)). As the authors acknowledge, the severity of the patients in the different groups was very different, and their analysis can only make sense if there is a selection of patients with the same degree of severity, i.e. the same percentage of lymphopenia.
The second major bias is that in an attempt to provide meaningful data, by eliminating the initial severity at the time of treatment, two tables are shown: one table where drugs are prescribed before intubation, and which shows no significant difference in the 3 different groups (9/90 (10%) in the HCQ group, 11/101 (10. 9%) HCQ+AZ, and 15/177 (8.5%) in the group without HCQ, chi-square = 0.47, ddl = 2, p = 0.79), and one table, where it is not clear when the drugs were prescribed, where there are significant differences. These differences are most likely related to the fact that the patients had been intubated for some before receiving hydroxychloroquine in desperation. It is notable that this is unreasonable at the time of the cytokine storm, as it is unlikely that hydrochloroquine alone would be able to control patients at this stage of the disease.
Moreover, incomprehensibly, the “untreated” group actually received azithromycin in 30% of cases, without this group being analyzed in any distinct way. Azithromycin is also a proposed treatment for COVID (Gautret, 2020) with in vitro efficacy (Andreani, 2020), and to mix it with patients who are supposedly untreated is something that is closer to scientific fraud than reasonable analysis.
Altogether these 3 voluntary biases are all pushing to the idea of dangerosity of hydroxychloroquine safest drug as reported on nearly 1 million people (Lane, 2020).
All in all, this is a work that shows that, in this period, it is possible to propose things that do not stand up to any methodological analysis to try to demonstrate that one is right.
End of letter
The cohort for this "study" was elderly black males with a variety of health issues and most of them were already intubated on ventillators, or about to be. And the HCQ group was biased towards the most critical patients as Dr Raoult says above. The death rate in NYC for coronavirus patients on ventillators has been reported at 88%. Most Doctors reporting success are using HCQ plus Zithromycin plus zinc and report the best results when the cocktail is used within a few days of symptoms start.
A couple of personal anecdotes:
An American friend who lives in Chapala, Mexico called me after he and his younger Mexican wife had both tested positive. She had light symptoms, and recovered easily without medications. He got very sick, high fever, cough, headaches etc and then his Doctor prescribed the HCQ + Zith + Zinc cocktail and after a few days recovered and is fine today.
Yesterday I had a video appt with my cardiologist, we reviewed my heart health (I had heart ablation surgery recently) and then I asked him if I were to catch coronavirus would I be able to use the HCQ cocktail for treatment. He took a look at my most recent EKG and said yes you'd be a good candidate for that, we've had success with several patients, I would just have you stop taking one of the medications you're on.
"What about that VA study" I asked.
"It looks like it was designed to fail"
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