Two days ago, the Infectious Disease Society (IDSA) published its recommendations against the use of Hydroxychloroquine and convalescent plasma for the treatment of COVID-19. Apparently, they knew that Trump would announce the FDA authorization of plasma therapy for COVID-19, and stroke preemptively. In the same time, they recommended ineffective and unsafe Remdesivir.
IDSA justified its recommendation against HCQ by repeating earlier lies and fallacies. It disregarded the real-world evidence, handled various treatment regimens including HCQ as one treatment, and made a review that included already refuted failures and frauds (Magagnoli, Geleris, Mahevas, Rosenberg, etc.), and excluded large studies showing great effectiveness of Hydroxychloroquine + Azithromycin treatment. Some of the excluded studies:
Yu et al., Beneficial effects exerted by hydroxychloroquine in treating COVID-19, August 3, 2020
Scholz, Derwand, Zelenko. COVID-19 Outpatients – Early Risk-Stratified Treatment with Zinc Plus Low Dose Hydroxychloroquine and Azithromycin, preprint, July 3, 2020
The Lancet Rheumatology published another anti-HCQ paper, titled surprisingly similar to Mehra et al. fraud, published by The Lancet on May 22: Risk of hydroxychloroquine alone and in combination with azithromycin in the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis: a multinational, retrospective study. This one might be not an outright fraud, but incorrect and produced by dubious methods.
Further, a closer look reveals that the title and abstract contradict the article’s data. The data shows safety of Hydroxychloroquine alone and Hydroxychloroquine + Azithromycin combination for short term treatment.
To manufacture conclusions that are bad for HCQ, the study authors included a dubious dataset from the US Veterans Health Administration (VA). VA data is secret, and was already used in another anti-HCQ fraud Magagnoli et al. Then they focused on a short term cardiac mortality. Most of the deaths came from the VA dataset. Excluding it, there is one group of ~24,000 patients treated with HCQ+AZM (Azithromycin), and another – with HCQ+AMX (Amoxicillin), for up to 30 days. There were 9 & 6 deaths, respectively. This is 0.05% mortality without a statistically significant difference. In long term follow up, the frequency of adverse effects with AMX is the same, & sometimes higher than with AZM. By the way, in COVID-19 treatment, HCQ+AZM are used only for 5 days, not “up to 30”.
See this tweet for in-depth analysis of the dubious methods behind this “database study”.
via Science Defies Politics
August 24, 2020 at 11:36AM
