By David Harsanyi
Wednesday, June 03, 2020
Remember that scary hydroxychloroquine study in The
Lancet and New England Journal of Medicine that everyone in the
media was writing about a few weeks ago? It turns out that the underlying data
were likely fake:
A Guardian investigation can reveal
the US-based company Surgisphere, whose handful of employees appear to include
a science fiction writer and an adult-content model, has provided data for
multiple studies on Covid-19 co-authored by its chief executive, but has so far
failed to adequately explain its data or methodology.
A peer-reviewed Lancet study claimed that
Surgisphere culled data from nearly 15,000 COVID-19 patients from 1,200
hospitals around the world. There is no evidence that it collected any data from
anyone.
Partisans been rooting against hydroxychloroquine for
months now. There’s really no other way to describe the manic reaction to a
drug that has been widely, though anecdotally, said to have therapeutic value
against the coronavirus. Politicians have blocked attempts to study the drug.
The number of shoddy pieces of journalism surrounding hydroxychloroquine is
just remarkable. Apparently, it is also dangerous.
A couple of weeks ago, Joe Biden compared taking
hydroxychloroquine to drinking bleach, even though millions of Americans use
the drug every day to survive. At the time, I linked to an NPR
interview in which doctors at Columbia University and other research
institutions complained that they couldn’t find people to conduct simple
clinical trials on hydroxychloroquine’s effectiveness, even though the drug
was, as one doctor put it, “very very safe.”
Two verys.
Now we know that thousands of hospitals around the world
relied on Surgisphere data to make determinations about treatment and studies.
The WHO, the organization I am assured we must continue funding, halted
clinical trials — followed by a number of countries — because of the alleged
dangers borne from the imaginary data put together by an adult model.
WHO has now reversed course and resumed studies. If we learn that hydroxychloroquine is helpful mitigating the harm coronavirus — and that’s still a big if; a new study today shows that it is not effective as a prophylactic — we can probably thank knee-jerk anti-Trumpism for delays. Scientists have trouble conducting studies, medical journals will take shortcuts in a rush to prove the president wrong (what else could explain it?), and the media will publish any scary story that reaffirms their preexisting prejudices. If you’re interested in further corroding public trust in experts, this is a perfect way to do it. It’s a scandal.
No comments:
Post a Comment