Originally Posted by vilger (Post 1753164)

100 people in Maryland called the health department to inquire about this. Some dim wits will believe anything; like the guy who showed up in D.C. with an automatic weapon because he heard that Hillary Clinton was running a pedophile ring out of a pizza parlor.

Originally Posted by GoodLife (Post 1752419)

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"

Originally Posted by blueash (Post 1753892)

C'mon, who are these "most of the Doctors" you mention. Find me any published study where the authors used Zinc sulfate as well. You don't see zinc in this study because it has not been used in any of the HCZ benefit found studies. You are prone to quoting Dr. Raoult. It was his flawed study that got HCZ in the news.

Remember what he did? He treated patients sick enough to be in the hospital, not treated early. He treated 14 with HCZ and reported that with six days almost all were better compared to less than 20% better without HCZ. No zinc given, not given early.

The only mentions of zinc helping have been by a couple doctors on TV who made the "you need zinc claim" and have disappeared since making those claims, not published anything, not come back with follow up data. There are studies being done, none have reported any findings.

We should of course take special note, as you did of Dr. Cardillo


Now that is an amazing report. Very very ill, and then symptom free in 12 hours. But you need the zinc. And you provided a link. Here's something very strange. The link does not have the statement you provided. Here's what it now says:

Wow he treated 5 patients, and now the article does not make any 12 hour claims. And very very ill has morphed into all were outpatients. I can do math. He had 95 COVID patients. 90 got no treatment. 5 got combination treatment. Thus ZERO got HCZ without zinc. Where does the it only works with zinc come from? He never gives it without zinc so he has no idea. I don't know why the article has changed. Maybe the reporter got it wrong, maybe Cardillo said they misunderstood or he misspoke or he was "being sarcastic" when he made his claim. But his claim is gone from the link you gave. But the interview is still available on YouTube
He says that HCZ is useless unless given with zinc and that he is treating outpatients with the combination and all got better. He didn't say in the video it was 5 patients. And that he never treated anyone without zinc.

Funny how the literature has zero reports of zinc being needed for HCZ to "work" and you have "most doctors" If you treat your COVID patients really really early you will get a terrific cure rate. I understand that 99% of symptom free COVID patients recover if treated with properly rearranging their furniture.

Here's the point. Dr. Raoult's study claimed that hospitalized patients given just HCZ got better significantly more often and rapidly than those that did not. Nothing about zinc. Now people trying to replicate Raoult's data find it is not verifiable. In their data, HCZ fails. Either it works on its own or it doesn't. Nobody in any scientific paper has claimed HCZ plus zinc has shown benefit over just HCZ, or over no treatment. Nobody.

Originally Posted by GoodLife (Post 1754122)

A preprint of a Brazilian study using HCQ and azithromycin shows promising results

Of the 636 symptomatic outpatients, 412 started treatment with hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin and 224 refused medications (control group).

Need for hospitalization was 1.9% in the treatment group and 5.4% in the control group (2.8 times greater) and number needed to treat was 28 (NNT = 28). In those who started treatment before versus after the seventh day of symptoms, the need for hospitalization was 1.17% and 3.2%

Conclusion

Empirical treatment with hydroxychloroquine associated with azithromycin for suspected cases of COVID 19 infection reduces the need for hospitalization

Dropbox - 2020.04.15 journal manuscript final.pdf - Simplify your life

Originally Posted by blueash (Post 1754152)

Goodlife, I am starting to think you really don't care what you bring to the thread. At least have the intellectual honesty to tell the readers something about the study. Like tell them that the patients were never examined. Tell them that exactly zero were tested for COVID which means some of these people with "flu symptoms" had bacterial infections like strep or sinus or bacterial pneumonias. Does it surprise you that people with sinus infections and bacterial pneumonias might get better with antibiotics? It doesn't surprise me.

Perhaps you don't understand the meaning of NNT. It means you have to give the drugs to 28 people to have 1 person benefit. So if only one out of every 28 "sick" patients had an underlying bacterial illness this is exactly what your data should result. This study has absolutely zero meaning in treatment of COVID and by the way, these people forgot to add the zinc which is so important per your posts.

Originally Posted by blueash (Post 1754152)

Goodlife, I am starting to think you really don't care what you bring to the thread. At least have the intellectual honesty to tell the readers something about the study. Like tell them that the patients were never examined. Tell them that exactly zero were tested for COVID which means some of these people with "flu symptoms" had bacterial infections like strep or sinus or bacterial pneumonias. Does it surprise you that people with sinus infections and bacterial pneumonias might get better with antibiotics? It doesn't surprise me.

Perhaps you don't understand the meaning of NNT. It means you have to give the drugs to 28 people to have 1 person benefit. So if only one out of every 28 "sick" patients had an underlying bacterial illness this is exactly what your data should result. This study has absolutely zero meaning in treatment of COVID and by the way, these people forgot to add the zinc which is so important per your posts.

Originally Posted by Kenswing (Post 1754167)

Don't fret.. I doubt that there are too many people that are actually coming to TOTV to get the latest Covid news. The overwhelming amount of threads that are being posted with links to studies and the infinite amount of results makes them all pretty much worthless.

I'm waiting for actual peer reviewed studies that are backed by major universities and/or the CDC.

Originally Posted by GoodLife (Post 1754169)

Good strategy if you don't get sick before the studies come out. :)

Originally Posted by Kenswing (Post 1754175)

And what good will all these threads about studies do me if I do get sick?

Originally Posted by GoodLife (Post 1754196)

Apparently nothing according to you. That's fine with me.

Originally Posted by blueash (Post 1754152)

Goodlife, I am starting to think you really don't care what you bring to the thread.

Originally Posted by Kenswing (Post 1754167)

Don't fret.. I doubt that there are too many people that are actually coming to TOTV to get the latest Covid news. The overwhelming amount of threads that are being posted with links to studies and the infinite amount of results makes them all pretty much worthless.

I'm waiting for actual peer reviewed studies that are backed by major universities and/or the CDC.