Author Topic: hydroxychloroquine got 'cancelled' due to TDS  (Read 3241 times)

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Offline Zelhar

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hydroxychloroquine got 'cancelled' due to TDS
« on: July 29, 2020, 07:07:30 AM »
Hydroxychloroquine is no miracle cure but it is a valid treatment for COVID. The data is indicating it reduces the severity and the mortality risk of the disease.

https://www.newsweek.com/key-defeating-covid-19-already-exists-we-need-start-using-it-opinion-1519535

Online angryChineseKahanist

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Re: hydroxychloroquine got 'cancelled' due to TDS
« Reply #1 on: July 29, 2020, 10:19:27 AM »
the doctors should  decide not people haters.
U+262d=U+5350=U+9774

Offline Kahane-Was-Right BT

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Re: hydroxychloroquine got 'cancelled' due to TDS
« Reply #2 on: July 30, 2020, 03:07:21 PM »
Hydroxychloroquine is no miracle cure but it is a valid treatment for COVID. The data is indicating it reduces the severity and the mortality risk of the disease.

https://www.newsweek.com/key-defeating-covid-19-already-exists-we-need-start-using-it-opinion-1519535

That just isn't true.  The data indicates it does no such thing.  All data we have indicates it does nothing for covid patients.

The Henry Ford study is biased in multiple ways - By definition because it's a retrospective study, and we do not use those to demonstrate benefit of a medication.  Retrospective studies are hypothesis-generating for a medication at best.   

But in detail, it is also highly misleading, even as retrospective studies go, because there is a baseline imbalance between the patients chosen for each group.  There is a much higher percentage of patients receiving steroids (more than double!) in the HCQ group (And dexamethasone has demonstrated mortality benefit in severe covid19 patients, very much UNLIKE hydroxychloroquine which was an intervention arm in the same randomized controlled trial and FAILED.  I say the word demonstrated because an RCT is the only way to demonstrate the benefits of a medicine and dexamethasone worked).   In addition, there is an imbalance in age in the two groups selected by Henry Ford in their retrospective study.   Mortality in covid19 is massively skewed by age group.   

Whatever "benefit" they found here is most likely not true.   Once again, if there was a real benefit found from a good quality retrospective study, if they had actually bothered to balance it correctly and select matching patient groups, that would only be worthy of running a randomized controlled trial to demonstrate and confirm it, it would not be conclusive.  But in this case, even the "benefit" they cite is not real because of biased patient selection.  The "benefit" seen in this poor quality study design is very likely from steroids and age!

A nazi organization now running a health system and publishing misleading and false medical info to get people killed.  Don't believe Henry Ford's nonsense.

Offline Kahane-Was-Right BT

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Re: hydroxychloroquine got 'cancelled' due to TDS
« Reply #3 on: July 30, 2020, 03:08:33 PM »
There are multiple randomized controlled trials testing HCQ and HCQ+ Zpak which have all failed.   I will come back to this thread to list them later.

Offline Binyamin Yisrael

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Re: hydroxychloroquine got 'cancelled' due to TDS
« Reply #4 on: July 30, 2020, 04:51:53 PM »
What is TDS?


Offline Lisa

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Re: hydroxychloroquine got 'cancelled' due to TDS
« Reply #5 on: July 30, 2020, 06:17:17 PM »
Trump Derangement Syndrome

Offline Zelhar

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Re: hydroxychloroquine got 'cancelled' due to TDS
« Reply #6 on: July 30, 2020, 07:27:15 PM »
I would appreciate it. Politic shouldn't be a factor on this case. I am surprised that a real expert like Professor Risch would deliberately choose to avoid any mention of multiple experiments with negative results. I have also read the "white papers" that the frontline doctors put on their website. Again no mention for negative results except for the one experiment that used irrelevant methodology and was withdrawn from publication. On the other hand the evidence that Risch and the frontline doctors cite is no prove but it is at least highly indicative.
There are multiple randomized controlled trials testing HCQ and HCQ+ Zpak which have all failed.   I will come back to this thread to list them later.

Offline Kahane-Was-Right BT

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Re: hydroxychloroquine got 'cancelled' due to TDS
« Reply #7 on: August 07, 2020, 12:41:15 PM »
I would appreciate it. Politic shouldn't be a factor on this case. I am surprised that a real expert like Professor Risch would deliberately choose to avoid any mention of multiple experiments with negative results. I have also read the "white papers" that the frontline doctors put on their website. Again no mention for negative results except for the one experiment that used irrelevant methodology and was withdrawn from publication. On the other hand the evidence that Risch and the frontline doctors cite is no prove but it is at least highly indicative.

Sorry I was caught up with other things and didn't get back to this thread very quickly.   With all due respect to the Yale Epidemiologist, epidemiology is a discipline that is quite different from drug development and medical treatment, and he proves himself to be out of his league.  (There are no doubt some great epidemiologists who DO understand these other topics that are not their specific field, but I'm afraid he does not).

Here is an HCQ randomized controlled trial scorecard with all the published randomized controlled trials that I found online:

HCQ in Mild to Moderate Covid19: https://www.bmj.com/content/369/bmj.m1849 FAIL
HCQ in post-exposure prophylaxis: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2016638 FAIL
HCQ in non-hospitalized adults, early treatment: https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M20-4207 FAIL, ZERO impact on viral load. MOA disproven.
Early Treatment of Mild Covid-19: https://academic.oup.com/cid/advance-article/doi/10.1093/cid/ciaa1009/5872589#.XxCYlMdGoJM FAIL
HCQ With or without Zpak for covid19 https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2019014 FAIL
HCQ in the RECOVERY trial run by UK, a multi arm trial testing several interventions, where DEXAMETHASONE was proven to benefit covid19 patients https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.15.20151852v1  HCQ FAIL

And what NIAID has not published but stopped early for lack of efficacy was ANOTHER randomized controlled trial with multiple arms testing multiple drug interventions against placebo and where the remdesivir arm had some benefit, but HCQ had NONE.


GRADE:  F

Now these above trials are not all perfect and some would like to nitpick at their designs. But they are worlds above the junk people are touting to say HCQ works.  The best trial design to prove a drug's benefit is always the randomized double-blinded placebo-controlled trial.  That is the gold standard FDA requires for approval of a new medicine as a treatment, and for good reason. Because that type of trial is optimal for eliminating bias and proving (or disproving) benefit. It is the best we can do.  But all of these are randomized controlled trials of one type or another which are at the highest tier of testing.   Anything that isn't prospective and a randomized controlled trial isn't even in the same ballpark for level of evidence.  Results of other types of trials don't really count as anything other than a REASON to test something in an RCT.

Drawing conclusions about a medicine's benefits from open label trials, single arm studies, non-placebo controlled trials, non-randomized, retrospective studies, case control studies, etc is not sound medicine or science.  Everyone in drug development knows that. 
And we have striking real-world examples of this just from this recent pandemic.   
Small open label trials in China in the early days of the pandemic touted the use of IL6 receptor inhibitors for critical patients.  They "suggested benefit."  So the whole world basically adopted the premise that cytokine storm is happening in the critical stage patients, causing them to have organ damage and die, and you can shut this off by blocking IL6 receptor.  MANY hospitals utilized two available approved drugs that block IL6R and which work dramatically effectively for their approved indication, moderate and severe rheumatoid arthritis, to try to save the ventilated and severe patients.  Just as many hospitals threw HCQ at every patient they could find.  The two IL6R blocking therapies were pushed into phase 3 randomized controlled trials for severe and critical covid19 patients, and both failed to demonstrate benefit.  Even though in the low quality type of trials it looked like there was a reasonable hypothesis that it may work, they failed the RCTs, and we now know these do not provide benefit.

The same thing happened with HCQ+Zpak.  China data was actually mixed, not as "suggestive" as IL6 inhibition, but at least had some potential.  It was the French study of Didier Raoult that catapulted it in people's minds (including Trump's) that this was possibly "curative."

We are seeing the same problem with "convalescent plasma."  Mayo and others treated over 50,000 people (!!!) with this therapy so far without bothering to run a proper, controlled trial.  So we have no idea whether it works or not.  We have "signs" from single arm studies as those investigators put it.   Only once an RCT is run will we know if it works at all.

All those other kind of studies are good for only ONE thing.   Hypothesis generation.   They don't give us real answers. 

Offline Israel Chai

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Re: hydroxychloroquine got 'cancelled' due to TDS
« Reply #8 on: August 12, 2020, 11:07:03 PM »
Louie Gohmert says hcq helped him overcome corona.

https://www.newsmax.com/newsmax-tv/louie-gohmert-hydroxychloroquine-z-pak-zinc/2020/08/12/id/981878/?ns_mail_uid=d0c2cc52-8438-497b-9405-af2e8bd25c0e&ns_mail_job=DM137358_08122020&s=acs&dkt_nbr=010104ojr06m&fbclid=IwAR3bqFPn0xE8-Twtq6mMHEdUKZwt4i0IEXcJO-Gg288vW9VsDv2QPEoOmnM

Rep. Louie Gohmert to Newsmax TV: They Wanted Me to 'Just Die'; HCQ Saved Me
(Newsmax TV's "The Chris Salcedo Show")

By Eric Mack    |   Wednesday, 12 August 2020 06:05 PM

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Celebrating a victory over COVID-19 and hateful critics who they said wanted him to "just die," Rep. Louie Gohmert, R-Texas, told Newsmax TV that hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) helped him overcome his bout with the coronavirus.

"I know there were people, from some of the comments I got, they were hoping I would just die, but there were a lot of people praying," Gohmert told "The Chris Salcedo Show."

"But, I've got to say, Chris, I got the hydroxychloroquine, azithromycin, the z-pak, and zinc, and vitamins, steroid nebulizer, and I'm telling you, it made a huge difference, a huge difference.

"So, I'm doing so much better than I would have expected."

Gohmert has been a harsh critic both of face mask mandates and those politicizing the global coronavirus pandemic, but he is squarely on the side of believing in the power of prayer and HCQ as a treatment for COVID-19.

"I'm grateful that people like the president, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, and so many others have talked about it: Hydroxychloroquine, it may not be the silver bullet to slay COVID, the China virus, the Wuhan virus, but it is a help to so many people," Gohmert added to host Chris Salcedo. "Why would the non-doctors, Google, Twitter, Facebook, try to stop people from getting something that really does help people?

"It certainly helped me."
The fear of the L-rd is the beginning of knowledge

Offline Kahane-Was-Right BT

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Re: hydroxychloroquine got 'cancelled' due to TDS
« Reply #9 on: August 13, 2020, 06:24:39 PM »
Louie Gohmert says hcq helped him overcome corona.

https://www.newsmax.com/newsmax-tv/louie-gohmert-hydroxychloroquine-z-pak-zinc/2020/08/12/id/981878/?ns_mail_uid=d0c2cc52-8438-497b-9405-af2e8bd25c0e&ns_mail_job=DM137358_08122020&s=acs&dkt_nbr=010104ojr06m&fbclid=IwAR3bqFPn0xE8-Twtq6mMHEdUKZwt4i0IEXcJO-Gg288vW9VsDv2QPEoOmnM

Rep. Louie Gohmert to Newsmax TV: They Wanted Me to 'Just Die'; HCQ Saved Me
(Newsmax TV's "The Chris Salcedo Show")

By Eric Mack    |   Wednesday, 12 August 2020 06:05 PM

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Celebrating a victory over COVID-19 and hateful critics who they said wanted him to "just die," Rep. Louie Gohmert, R-Texas, told Newsmax TV that hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) helped him overcome his bout with the coronavirus.

"I know there were people, from some of the comments I got, they were hoping I would just die, but there were a lot of people praying," Gohmert told "The Chris Salcedo Show."

"But, I've got to say, Chris, I got the hydroxychloroquine, azithromycin, the z-pak, and zinc, and vitamins, steroid nebulizer, and I'm telling you, it made a huge difference, a huge difference.

"So, I'm doing so much better than I would have expected."

Gohmert has been a harsh critic both of face mask mandates and those politicizing the global coronavirus pandemic, but he is squarely on the side of believing in the power of prayer and HCQ as a treatment for COVID-19.

"I'm grateful that people like the president, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, and so many others have talked about it: Hydroxychloroquine, it may not be the silver bullet to slay COVID, the China virus, the Wuhan virus, but it is a help to so many people," Gohmert added to host Chris Salcedo. "Why would the non-doctors, Google, Twitter, Facebook, try to stop people from getting something that really does help people?

"It certainly helped me."

That's the thing about anecdotes.  When 99% of people who get coronavirus survive, then 1 guy saying "I SURVIVED!" is meaningless. 
A guy saying "HCQ helped me" is like saying "Doing 1 jumping jack each day helped me"  or "My choice of cereal as Cheerios for breakfast each morning helped me." 
He could have survived and been "helped" just the same without HCQ.  That is why there is a need to run clinical trials.  Otherwise every medicine that anyone ever said "Helped me!" would be assumed to work.  That's an invalid assumption.

Offline Israel Chai

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Re: hydroxychloroquine got 'cancelled' due to TDS
« Reply #10 on: August 14, 2020, 05:22:28 PM »
That's the thing about anecdotes.  When 99% of people who get coronavirus survive, then 1 guy saying "I SURVIVED!" is meaningless. 
A guy saying "HCQ helped me" is like saying "Doing 1 jumping jack each day helped me"  or "My choice of cereal as Cheerios for breakfast each morning helped me." 
He could have survived and been "helped" just the same without HCQ.  That is why there is a need to run clinical trials.  Otherwise every medicine that anyone ever said "Helped me!" would be assumed to work.  That's an invalid assumption.

The stats are there, it's saving lots vs. doing nothing. And for some reason, all the medical establishment tells me they need a trial they need a trial, unless it's a vaccine and then who cares if it kills 99%, we need no trials, just it now.
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Offline Kahane-Was-Right BT

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Re: hydroxychloroquine got 'cancelled' due to TDS
« Reply #11 on: August 14, 2020, 05:35:26 PM »
The stats are there, it's saving lots vs. doing nothing. And for some reason, all the medical establishment tells me they need a trial they need a trial, unless it's a vaccine and then who cares if it kills 99%, we need no trials, just it now.

It seems you like you didn't bother to read http://jtf.org/forum/index.php/topic,92954.msg693268.html#msg693268

Multiple trials have been done, and the problem is that they failed.  Thus disproving the anecdotes. 
But keep promoting this and paying lipservice for Todaro and his boyfriend Rigano, I'm sure they both have investments in some Indian company that makes the drug and are profiting on this without telling you. There is little other reason to explain their dogmatic propaganda efforts in spite of all evidence to the contrary.

Offline Israel Chai

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Re: hydroxychloroquine got 'cancelled' due to TDS
« Reply #12 on: August 14, 2020, 05:58:21 PM »
It seems you like you didn't bother to read http://jtf.org/forum/index.php/topic,92954.msg693268.html#msg693268

Multiple trials have been done, and the problem is that they failed.  Thus disproving the anecdotes. 
But keep promoting this and paying lipservice for Todaro and his boyfriend Rigano, I'm sure they both have investments in some Indian company that makes the drug and are profiting on this without telling you. There is little other reason to explain their dogmatic propaganda efforts in spite of all evidence to the contrary.

Funny you mention buddy boy, he thinks the test was complete crap, and I trust him more than Fauci.

https://gnews.org/290096/

Dr. James Todaro, MD, Columbia University, tweeted a series of posts on August 1, 2020, questioning a randomized controlled trail (RCT) on early use of hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) conducted by the University of Minnesota. The study was sponsored by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), and Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of NIAID has been using the lack of positive results from RCTs as the main argument for hindering the use of HCQ for treating patients infected with the CCP virus.

Dr. Todaro listed the flaws of the UMN study, including many serious design issues and concluded that “The Minnesota study is honestly an embarrassment to the term ‘randomized controlled trial’ and should actually be called an ‘anonymous online survey’ instead.”

Studies like this one could have mislead ordinary Americans who have little knowledge of medicine and could have caused clinically proved effective therapies such as HCQ not be able to be used on patients. More and more regular citizens in the United States start to realize the possible corruption in the research field and are witnessing the hypocrisy of the so-called “experts” and “scientists”.

Dr. James Todaro’s Tweets

1/ Dr. Fauci is misleading the American people when he says that randomized controlled trials have shown hydroxychloroquine to be ineffective. Here’s why.

2/ There’s only one double-blind RCT on HCQ in early treatment of COVID-19. All of the other RCTs (SOLIDARITY, RECOVERY, etc) were in very sick patients and are borderline worthless because they just support what we’ve been saying since March—HCQ is for early disease, not late.

3/ The “randomized controlled trial” for EARLY treatment of COVID-19 that Dr. Fauci is too embarrassed to even mention by name is the one done by the University of Minnesota, “Hydroxychloroquine in Nonhospitalized Adults With Early COVID-19” (Jul 2020)

4/ The Minnesota study is honestly an embarrassment to the term “randomized controlled trial” and should actually be called an “anonymous online survey” instead.

5/ Only 34% of participants had a positive PCR test. The remaining 66% either did not have a PCR test or actually tested negative. This means that a positive diagnosis was made based on only SYMPTOMS for the vast majority of participants. This isn’t great, but it gets worse.

6/ The participants were evaluated via a static online survey and not actually seen by physicians or medical personnel. So the quality of the diagnosis was essentially equivalent to someone typing symptoms into WebMD.

7/ What happens if a large percent of the participants didn’t actually have COVID-19? It would diminish the observed therapeutic effect of hydroxychloroquine (HCQ probably isn’t going to help allergies or the common cold).

8/ Next point. If the researchers had kept their original end point (hospitalization/death), the study would’ve actually shown a strong trend toward benefit for HCQ. Instead, the researchers changed the end point mid-study from hospitalizations/death to symptoms at 14 days.

9/ The conclusion of the study is actually a ~40% reduction in hospitalizations/deaths in patients treated with HCQ vs placebo (2.5% vs 4.1%). This did not reach significance, but would have been strong encouragement to proceed with additional higher powered RCTs.

10/ The good news is that Dr. Fauci & the NIH started a trial in May doing just this. The bad news is they cancelled the trial after enrolling only 20 subjects in order to focus on a new trial evaluating remdesivir plus baricitinib (another “novel” patented drug).

11/ In conclusion, it’s been >4 mos since HCQ was proposed for early stage COVID-19. Yet, with their vast resources, neither the WHO nor NIH conducted a trial on this. Instead Dr. Fauci’s evidence for the inefficacy of HCQ comes from an online survey under the guise of an RCT.

    You look at the scientific data & the evidence. And the scientific data…on trials that are valid that were randomized & controlled in the proper way, all of those trials show consistently that HCQ is not effective in the treatment of coronavirus
    – Fauci
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Offline Zelhar

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Re: hydroxychloroquine got 'cancelled' due to TDS
« Reply #13 on: August 16, 2020, 04:47:17 PM »
@KWRBT and everyone, first disclaimer I am not giving anyone a medical advice and altogether I think politics must stay out of the scientific and medical research and treatment. The main point I was trying to stress is that I don't think twitter and co should censor anyone and certainly not censoring legitimate scientists and physicians.

I see that all the articles which you cite with failed results don't actually test for the suggested tripple treatment protocol which is Zinc,  low dose Hydroxychloroquine and Azithromycin for risk patients at the onset of the first symptoms.

This is a retrospective study for example which suggests good results with this treatment protocol:
https://www.preprints.org/manuscript/202007.0025/v1


Offline Kahane-Was-Right BT

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Re: hydroxychloroquine got 'cancelled' due to TDS
« Reply #14 on: August 16, 2020, 09:26:30 PM »
@KWRBT and everyone, first disclaimer I am not giving anyone a medical advice and altogether I think politics must stay out of the scientific and medical research and treatment. The main point I was trying to stress is that I don't think twitter and co should censor anyone and certainly not censoring legitimate scientists and physicians.

I see that all the articles which you cite with failed results don't actually test for the suggested tripple treatment protocol which is Zinc,  low dose Hydroxychloroquine and Azithromycin for risk patients at the onset of the first symptoms.

This is a retrospective study for example which suggests good results with this treatment protocol:
https://www.preprints.org/manuscript/202007.0025/v1

Once again, retrospective studies don't mean anything.   It only suggests a hypothesis that should be tested in a real study.

And I have to stress here that the HCQ propagandists like Todaro, Rigano, and Raoult, from day 1 of their relentless promotion of this medicine, NEVER said it had to be combined with zinc in order to work.  They claimed initially based on the poorly designed French study of Raoult that HCQ works by itself and is curative in combination with azithromycin.   NO ZINC requirement.

That is why so many trials were run without zinc.  All these trials I cited were designed and run based on the existing hype that was being pushed.   Especially by these 3.  These 3 and their "french study" is what got this medicine on Fox News and into the President's brain via Peter Navarro.  This is where all the hype came from, NOT Zelenko, and so the whole world tried to implement this thinking it would help covid19 patients.   But it did not.

Only after so many trial failures, they now say, "Oh , well , this won't work without zinc."  Yeah, ok.  Then prove it.   And why did no one say that BEFORE?
Meanwhile any person NOT insisting on zinc but pushing HCQ all this time (And there are many) has done a disservice to the entire world by convincing the medical establishment to throw HCQ and Azithromycin at every possible patient and to run trials based on only that treatment regimen.  Which now in hindsight they claim "Never would have worked without Zinc."   So did they purposely kill all those people by giving them placebo and convincing hospitals to do so?   

The insistence on zinc as part of the protocol is only a shifting of the goal posts and redrawing the bullseye around the arrows when all the other protocols have failed miserably.   

Of course, it is possible the zinc hypothesis is true.  But that would have to be proven.   And usually this type of goal post shifting is considered grasping for straws with a failed medicine.  But it's not like there's a shortage of patients, surely someone can run a real trial and prove it, no?

Offline Kahane-Was-Right BT

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Re: hydroxychloroquine got 'cancelled' due to TDS
« Reply #15 on: August 16, 2020, 09:29:28 PM »
Funny you mention buddy boy, he thinks the test was complete crap, and I trust him more than Fauci.

https://gnews.org/290096/

Dr. James Todaro, MD, Columbia University, tweeted a series of posts on August 1, 2020, questioning a randomized controlled trail (RCT) on early use of hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) conducted by the University of Minnesota. The study was sponsored by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), and Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of NIAID has been using the lack of positive results from RCTs as the main argument for hindering the use of HCQ for treating patients infected with the CCP virus.

Dr. Todaro listed the flaws of the UMN study, including many serious design issues and concluded that “The Minnesota study is honestly an embarrassment to the term ‘randomized controlled trial’ and should actually be called an ‘anonymous online survey’ instead.”

Studies like this one could have mislead ordinary Americans who have little knowledge of medicine and could have caused clinically proved effective therapies such as HCQ not be able to be used on patients. More and more regular citizens in the United States start to realize the possible corruption in the research field and are witnessing the hypocrisy of the so-called “experts” and “scientists”.

Dr. James Todaro’s Tweets

1/ Dr. Fauci is misleading the American people when he says that randomized controlled trials have shown hydroxychloroquine to be ineffective. Here’s why.

2/ There’s only one double-blind RCT on HCQ in early treatment of COVID-19. All of the other RCTs (SOLIDARITY, RECOVERY, etc) were in very sick patients and are borderline worthless because they just support what we’ve been saying since March—HCQ is for early disease, not late.

3/ The “randomized controlled trial” for EARLY treatment of COVID-19 that Dr. Fauci is too embarrassed to even mention by name is the one done by the University of Minnesota, “Hydroxychloroquine in Nonhospitalized Adults With Early COVID-19” (Jul 2020)

4/ The Minnesota study is honestly an embarrassment to the term “randomized controlled trial” and should actually be called an “anonymous online survey” instead.

5/ Only 34% of participants had a positive PCR test. The remaining 66% either did not have a PCR test or actually tested negative. This means that a positive diagnosis was made based on only SYMPTOMS for the vast majority of participants. This isn’t great, but it gets worse.

6/ The participants were evaluated via a static online survey and not actually seen by physicians or medical personnel. So the quality of the diagnosis was essentially equivalent to someone typing symptoms into WebMD.

7/ What happens if a large percent of the participants didn’t actually have COVID-19? It would diminish the observed therapeutic effect of hydroxychloroquine (HCQ probably isn’t going to help allergies or the common cold).

8/ Next point. If the researchers had kept their original end point (hospitalization/death), the study would’ve actually shown a strong trend toward benefit for HCQ. Instead, the researchers changed the end point mid-study from hospitalizations/death to symptoms at 14 days.

9/ The conclusion of the study is actually a ~40% reduction in hospitalizations/deaths in patients treated with HCQ vs placebo (2.5% vs 4.1%). This did not reach significance, but would have been strong encouragement to proceed with additional higher powered RCTs.

10/ The good news is that Dr. Fauci & the NIH started a trial in May doing just this. The bad news is they cancelled the trial after enrolling only 20 subjects in order to focus on a new trial evaluating remdesivir plus baricitinib (another “novel” patented drug).

11/ In conclusion, it’s been >4 mos since HCQ was proposed for early stage COVID-19. Yet, with their vast resources, neither the WHO nor NIH conducted a trial on this. Instead Dr. Fauci’s evidence for the inefficacy of HCQ comes from an online survey under the guise of an RCT.

    You look at the scientific data & the evidence. And the scientific data…on trials that are valid that were randomized & controlled in the proper way, all of those trials show consistently that HCQ is not effective in the treatment of coronavirus
    – Fauci

Like I said, he is nit picking one particular study.  But he's ignoring all the other RCT's I cited.  I am well familiar with the University of Minnesota study.   It was run to the investigator's best ability at that time.  They didn't have efficient testing in place in America in the early days of the pandemic.  He deserves credit for trying his best to run a controlled trial despite that situation.  So yes the design was imperfect, but it's still an RCT that is a level of evidence world's above any retrospective or other nonsense the HCQ bros like Todaro cite. Imagine that, that even a flawed study like this is of better quality than the junk being pushed to promote this hype!  That says a lot.

If that was the only trial that had been run and failed, you couldn't conclude too much from it, because of its limitations in terms of testing and confirmation of diagnosis.   But adding it up with the other RCT's that failed, it's part of an overall pattern of failing to find a benefit for this medication in covid19 patients.

This isn't about "trust" because I can evaluate this matter with my own brain.  I don't need to "trust" anything Fauci is saying.  What he's saying is in the papers I cited.   He isn't saying anything novel.  It is not unique to Fauci.  It's the same thing anyone knowledgeable about drug development and clinical trials would say about these trials.  Just simple facts.  They failed.  He's reporting what happened, which is clear to anyone who looks at these studies without a pre-existing stance.  The fact that Fauci's opinion is the same as mine, you should just view as a coincidence. Fauci has nothing to do with me.  It's not a popularity contest that determines what is true.

The idea that Boulware ran his study to purposely harm patients or purposely cause the drug to fail the trial is conspiracy theory type of thinking on a level with "Jews did 9/11."  It's simply preposterous.   That they resort to this kind of vicious claim about studies that fail shows you the low character of this eye doctor turned bitcoin investor HCQ promoter and his italian lawyer boyfriend.    All Boulware tried to do was help patients and establish a level of evidence for this treatment everyone was talking about.  It didn't work out.  And his flawed study wasn't the only one that failed.

RECOVERY was a very well designed study that failed.  But its dexamethasone arm succeeded.  Dex is an old, off-patent steroid.  There is zero opposition to a medicine like this when it proves benefit in a real trial.  The entire medical establishment embraced that result.  Because it's proven.  This alone should cause you to question the conspiracy theory suggesting there is some cabal intent on suppressing HCQ.   No such cabal is suppressing Dexamethasone
« Last Edit: August 16, 2020, 10:03:46 PM by Kahane-Was-Right BT »

Offline Kahane-Was-Right BT

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Re: hydroxychloroquine got 'cancelled' due to TDS
« Reply #16 on: August 16, 2020, 09:35:29 PM »
Another important thing to consider here is that the whole hypothesis behind HCQ based on its MOA was that it supposedly worked in cell culture.  That's a low bar, as just about anything can work in cell culture, but has no guarantee of succeeding in trials in real people with real diseases, but even that low bar is now called into question. 

The mechanism against SARS-Cov2 was demonstrated in Vero cells from monkeys.  These are derived from a monkey's kidney.

But when you run the same infection assay in human lung cells, the HCQ fails against Sars-Cov2 in that infection assay.  Since we are trying to treat people with a lung infection, the human lung cell model is much more relevant, and if HCQ doesn't even work in cells, it's extremely unlikely to work in people.

This is a very important study:  https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2575-3

Offline Joe Gutfeld

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Re: hydroxychloroquine got 'cancelled' due to TDS
« Reply #17 on: August 19, 2020, 11:17:32 AM »
Trump is not going to get credit for anything positive