And speaking of science and politics: fake research for political aims?
It wouldn’t be the first time, either.
Once hydroxychloroquine was touted by Trump as a possible tool against COVID, the drug’s days were numbered. Is it any wonder that a major study came out against it, and now there’s growing evidence that the study may have been fudged or at least very sloppy?
Please read the whole thing; it’s long. But here are some excerpts:
Other researchers immediately took issue with the analysis. The study doesn’t properly control for the likelihood that patients getting the experimental drugs were sicker than the controls, says Matthew Semler, a critical care physician at Vanderbilt University. “If you have a physician sitting with two patients who have coronavirus, and the physician chooses to give one of them hydroxychloroquine, they’re doing it for a reason,” he says. The patient may be relying on high levels of supplemental oxygen, for example, or getting worse over time. But those kinds of details aren’t available about the patients in the Lancet study, he notes.
Other researchers were befuddled by the data themselves. Though 66% of the patients were reportedly treated in North America, the reported doses tended to be higher than the guidelines set by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, White notes. The authors claim to have included 4402 patients in Africa, 561 of whom died, but it seems unlikely that African hospitals would have detailed electronic health records for so many patients, White says.
These problems are obvious, not subtle. When I first heard about the study, for example, I immediately realized it was highly likely the drugs were given to much sicker patients in the first place, which would make the results completely meaningless.
More:
The potential of hydroxychloroquine for treating COVID-19 has become a political flashpoint, and the questions around the Lancet paper have provided new fodder to the drug’s supporters. French microbiologist Didier Raoult, whose own widely criticized studies suggested a benefit from the drug, derided the new study in a video posted today, calling the authors “incompetent.” On social media, some speculated that the paper was part of a conspiracy against hydroxychloroquine.
For scientists running randomized trials of hydroxychloroquine, an urgent question has been how to respond to the paper and the many questions raised about it. Some studies were not halted at all. A hydroxychloroquine trial known as ORCHID, funded by the U.S. National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, opted to keep running after its data and safety monitoring board (DSMB) reviewed safety data from already enrolled participants, says Semler, a co-investigator on the study.
WHO’s paused Solidarity trial is awaiting a similar review from its DSMB, says Soumya Swaminathan, the organization’s chief scientist. The pause will allow time for a review of published studies and interim data from Solidarity itself, she says. WHO paused the trial to show investigators and potential study participants that the agency takes safety issues seriously, she says. “We want to reassure people that the WHO didn’t make any kind of value judgment on the use of hydroxychloroquine.”
But some say WHO had a knee-jerk reaction to a questionable study. “This is a drug that has been used for decades. It’s not like we know nothing about its safety,” says Miguel Hernán, a Harvard epidemiologist and co-investigator on an ongoing trial of hydroxychloroquine in Spain and Latin America for COVID-19 prevention in health care workers.
The controversy has been an unfortunate distraction, Hernán adds. “If you do something as inflammatory as this without a solid foundation, you are going to make a lot of people waste time trying to understand what is going on.”
Isn’t that the point?
Feminists made it de riguer to do this kind of crappy research, it being obvious they entered the field for little actual love of it, but to prove things, including some great study that would scientifically prove their ideology… its so bad the majority of the science in the field is crap and used only for legal games… (just say everything even contradictory things hurt women more than men – but they are the same… )
everywhere they go the standards are dropped…
or its a conspiracy against them
I have yet to see one area where the standards were raised..
P.S. now after forcing men out of college the men are now to blame for not earning enough for them to have mates to marry!!! seriously.. its the mens fault either way… they are now upset there is nobody there
And now:
https://www.fox5dc.com/news/infectious-disease-specialists-call-for-an-end-to-tear-gas-during-covid-19-pandemic
What happened to treatment with lead? High velocity lead!
Sapan Desai’s co-authors on the Lancet paper were cardiologist Mandeep Mehra of Harvard University’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH), cardiologist Frank Ruschitzka of the University Hospital Zürich, and cardiac surgeon Amit Patel, who listed affiliations with the University of Utah and HCA Research Institute in Nashville, Tennessee.
Who are these people? All foreigners! A heart surgeon whose reach extends from UT to TN? Red flags are flying!
Further, they “used hospital records procured by a little-known data analytics company called Surgisphere to conclude that coronavirus patients taking chloroquine or hydroxychloroquine were more likely to show an irregular heart rhythm—a known side effect thought to be rare—and were more likely to die in the hospital.”
“More likely” may have meant they were more sickly and more likely to die, as I’ve noted previously.
Surgisphere has been involved in several other data matters, and has now been discredited by NEJM, Lancet and the WHO. What does peer review mean today? Not much!
Who founded Surgisphere? Why, Sapan Desai.
With suspect data, data sets and code not provided, this study is not definitive at all.
“…in the Lancet study,”
For how many years has the Lancet been corrupted politically?
Gerard vanderleun:
At least 2 decades, I believe.
This is a very odd story, and it deserves more investigation, but I’m a little surprised that even this much has been published in “Science.” Usually, when a paper is attacked, the criticism is limited to the research itself. In this case, the problems are more pervasive.
The first author, Sapan Desai, owns a company called Surgisphere. That company supplied the data for the papers published in “The Lancet” and “NEJM” (New England Journal of Medicine). Surgisphere is a tiny company that may be a house of cards. To me, it looks as if they fabricated the data. To what end? I assume that Sapan Desai never thought he’d get caught, and that all the attention that the paper received would generate business for his company, Surgisphere. That’s pure speculation. I could well be wrong. But if that’s not Desai’s motive, then what is?
And what in the world motivated Desai’s co-authors. Did they uncritically accept the data, and then lend their names for increased credibility. Why? Trump Derangement Syndrome? Some journalist needs to interview them. Will their universities protect them from what now looks like a mixture of fraud and incompetence?
Finally, the easiest question to answer: How did this research ever get past the editors and peer reviewers at The Lancet and NEJM? Both journals’ editors and reviewers are dominated by those with Trump Derangement Syndrome. The Lancet is, more broadly, rabidly anti-American. They badly wanted to believe this research, because Trump once casually made an off-hand remark expressing a hopeful attitude towards hydroxychloroquine for the treatment of COVID-19. That was enough to drive the Left mad.
Meanwhile, research on hydroxychloroquine came to a screeching halt. How many lives will be lost as a consequence? Trump Derangement Syndrome kills.
Edward:
Well if they enforced the social distancing requirements there wouldn’t be a need for tear gas would there? Burning buildings and burning police cars can generate smoke which can cause coughing too. Not a good thing Dr. Infectious Disease Specialist.
Regarding lead, that is an environmental no-no, bismuth tungsten bullets only (or some such BS). Rubber bullets? Those are from fossil fuels, can’t have that. We must use canes and truncheons made from sustainable bamboo or non-old growth timber. Nix to that, that would be violence, like speech.
Lancet papers stats are often crap because they are politically motivated. Leftist science!
Everything has become political. Everything.
And not just political but vituperatively so.
All exacerbated by the demon of social media.
There is no common bond. Decency has gone up in smoke.
Everyone seems to have turned into a raving, hormone-driven teenager.
Insanity is the “new normal”.
It will doom society if it continues. (And why should it stop?)
Anyway. my point. Oh yes, if you search for “hydroxychloroquine+effective” in DuckDuckGo, you come up with a far different array of articles than when you do it in Google. (Guess which are more positive…)
What I read about Surgisphere is that, while claiming data agreements with ‘100’s’ of hospitals, the company only has a total of 5 employees, and only one of them has medical experience. The Guardian says one of the others is a Science Fiction writer and another is a male model. Fabulous.
I’ve already told my wife and my doctor, if I start showing any symptoms it’s zinc and hydroxychloroquine starting right away. I’ve taken the latter before when I was working in West Africa, so I know I’m fine with it.
“The Guardian says one of the others is a Science Fiction writer and another is a male model.”
Sounds like the Obama cabinet.
Science and politics?
Fake research?
Using disease (and nature) as a political cudgel to beat one’s adversaries?
It’s causing despair for even the most wide-eyed optimist.
And it looks like Gaia, too, has had it, simply had it—ENOUGH of all this rank, partisan dishonesty—and will no longer restrain her rage, anger, disdain and disgust. The gloves are off:
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/swarm-earthquakes-yellowstone-renews-fears-supervolcano-eruption
A couple details:
[1] This is not about science. What The Lancet published was a fucking statistics, nothing less, nothing more. That’s not science, the same reason a screw is not a machine.
[2] This is basically a war on terms. Right now, you publish some random statistics and format them as a paper, that’s “science”. You criticize it, then you “deny science”. You point out any campaign that it’s out there, in plain sight, that’s “conspiracy”. You point out the high criminality or the low IQ in the black community (which are facts, not even opinions), that’s “racism”. And so on. Modern politics and journalism is about labeling. And it works.
—
At the end of the day, this is political marketing. If you criticize Trump supporting hydroxychloroquine, that sounds as politics. If you release some bad done statistics, but you publish it in some peer-reviewed journal and you say that’s “science”, then it becomes politically useful. That’s why organizations that control published papers or science funding are becoming more and more politically controlled.
About one year ago, a paper was deleted because it was politically incorrect. Only a few people cared. It was extremely important, though, because it was the first time in history that a published paper was completely erased from records. No matter how wrong it’s a paper, it was never erased before. It could be debunked, but not erased. 20 years ago, that would have been a huge scandal and that paper would have been restored. Not anymore.
What mattered was not that particular paper. What mattered is that it was a symptom that peer-reviewed journals were already controlled. Science is becoming less science and more another tool for political marketing.
““A short time ago, our leading agriculturist, B., was shot with thirty of his
collaborators because he maintained the opinion that nitrate artificial manure
was superior to potash. No. 1 is all for potash; therefore B. and the thirty had
to be liquidated as saboteurs. In a nationally centralized agriculture, the
alternative of nitrate or potash is of enormous importance: it can decide the
issue of the next war. If No. I was in the right, history will absolve him, and
the execution of the thirty-one men will be a mere bagatelle. If he was wrong…”
and
“Why did you execute Bogrov?”
“Why? Because of the submarine question,” said Ivanov. “It concerned the problem of tonnage—an old quarrel, the beginnings of which must be familiar to you. Bogrov advocated the construction of submarines of large tonnage and a
long range of action. The Party is in favour of small submarines with a short range. You can build three times as many small submarines for your money as big ones. Both parties had valid technical arguments. The experts made a big display of technical sketches and algebraic formulae; but the actual problem lay in quite a different sphere. Big submarines mean: a policy of aggression, to further world revolution. Small submarines mean coastal defense—that is, self-defense and postponement of world revolution. The latter is the point of view of No. 1, and the Party. Bogrov had a strong following in the Admiralty and amongst the officers of the old guard. It would not have been enough
to put him out of the way; he also had to be discredited. A trial was projected to unmask the partisans of big tonnage as saboteurs and traitors. We had already brought several little engineers to the point of being willing to confess publicly to
whatever we liked. But Bogrov wouldn’t play the game. He declaimed up to the very end of big tonnage and world revolution. He was two decades behind the times. He would not understand that the times are against us, that Europe is
passing through a period of reaction, that we are in the hollow of a wave and must wait until we are lifted by the next. In a public trial he would only have created confusion amongst the people. There was no other way possible than to liquidate him administratively. Would not you have done the same thing in our position?”
–Arthur Koestler, ‘Darkness at Noon’
None of this surprises me. Only thing surprising is the truth about this “study” is slowly getting out. But it will almost certainly be swept into the dustbin by the commie fascists on the verge of totally running our country.
This is such an awful time … locked down and inundated by propaganda. It’s isolating and terrifying.
Struggling to summon optimism here. Seriously afraid to even post this. They will stop at nothing – pogroms, gulags, property seizure, mass executions.
This is standard left-wing “science”. It’s constant in climate science. We see the same sloppy crap in economics — minimum wage, income inequality, gender pay gap. Feminists — women don’t lie about rape, sex assault on campus. If people actually look at the work, it’s not just sloppy. It’s brain dead stupid.
Lefties don’t care. Get the garbage published and the MSM will push it as if it were revealed truth handed down from on high. It’s a deliberate strategy. Been playing the game this way for decades. These are just political weapons. Like the hockey stick and the wacko polar bear study. These “studies” would flunk a middle school science fair for special needs kids. They are worse than ridiculous. Doesn’t matter. They were published. Therefore must be true. The end.
Our society has an “expert” fetish and a really bizarre respect for peer review and published “research”. The public has no idea that there is ZERO quality control for any of this garbage.
A lot of the studies with poor results from HCQ (such as NYC study that Cuomo initiated) have omitted zinc from the regimen. It’s been well-known that zinc is a crucial part of the treatment. If they wanted to sabotage the results for political reasons, that would be a way to do it.
New insights on the antiviral effects of chloroquine against coronavirus: what to expect for COVID-19?
The multiple molecular mechanisms by which chloroquine can achieve such results remain to be further explored. … preliminary data indicate that chloroquine interferes with SARS-CoV-2 attempts to acidify the lysosomes and presumably inhibits cathepsins, which require a low pH for optimal cleavage of SARS-CoV-2 spike protein
Zn2+ Inhibits Coronavirus and Arterivirus RNA Polymerase Activity In Vitro and Zinc Ionophores Block the Replication of These Viruses in Cell Culture
HCQ is the border guard, while Zinc is the Choice in a Planned Pathogen (PP) protocol.
As with all drugs, vaccines, etc., this disinfectant cocktail is not a magical elixir. One long-time known, not exception, but caveat is:
Glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase deficiency
people with glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase deficiency, hemolytic anemia is most often triggered by bacterial or viral infections or by certain drugs (such as some antibiotics and medications used to treat malaria). Hemolytic anemia can also occur after eating fava beans or inhaling pollen from fava plants (a reaction called favism).
Add more data to my folders on decline of the West (US, culture, etc).
Since I’ve seen this scene before, and when the too convenient story broke, I was expecting fraud. This science as propaganda started in climate, it’s spread everywhere.
Feel welcome to join me in my studied and professional cynicism. Trends that cannot go on forever will end, we’re told. Realism is the heroic stance in this because there is no joy in suffering through Sysiphus’ merde.
“For how many years has the Lancet been corrupted politically?”
====================
Well, at least since 2004 (?) when they rushed out the Iraq body count article so that it would be published before the US election. Not that they wanted to influence the election in any way, or anything.
At the time (from memory), using the Lancet numbers, I came up with an average of 600-700 ‘extra’ deaths a day. Given that war is not a well organized production line, there had to be days with 1000+ ‘extra’ deaths.
Does anyone seriously think that the press wouldn’t have screamed at the top of their lungs over that? That didn’t happen, so let’s just say I’m sceptical about that study.
It’s Democrat Derangement Syndrome at the Lancet, and throughout the many Dem supporting media and academic places.
In 2004, it was Bush-hate. Today, Trump-hate. At the NYT, Tom Cotton (Rep)-hate, for calling for US troops to be used to quell the violent riots.
Two years ago it was Kavanaugh-hate.
The Nazis created hate against the Jews.
Democrats today are creating hate against Republicans.
(The conversation in my head with a Democrat friend who says: “Trump is Hitler”.
“Hmm. Hate feels good, doesn’t it? To hate Trump, and feel so righteous about it. Doesn’t it feel good to hate Trump?
I’m sure the Nazis had similar good feelings when they hated Jews. Do you think your feelings are similar to those Nazi feelings? Feeling good about hating?”)
Times like these when I’m glad not to be in the US. It’s not yet nearly this bad in Slovakia.