Second article by the Guardian.
“Surgisphere: governments and WHO changed Covid-19 policy based on suspect data from tiny US company
Surgisphere, whose employees appear to include a sci-fi writer and adult content model, provided database behind Lancet and New England Journal of Medicine hydroxychloroquine studies”
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“While Surgisphere claims to run one of the largest and fastest hospital databases in the world, it has almost no online presence. Its Twitter handle has fewer than 170 followers, with no posts between October 2017 and March 2020.”
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The perps
“On Wednesday, the NEJM and the Lancet published an expression of concern about the hydroxychloroquine study, which listed respected cardiologist Mandeep Mehra as the lead author and Desai as co-author.”
1. Who is Eric Topol?
“It just seems like we are ignoring signal after signal,” says Eric Topol, director of the Scripps Translational Science Institute. U.S. President Donald Trump’s promotion of it led to a scientific “obsession” with hydroxychloroquine despite thin evidence for its promise, he says. “We’d be better off shifting our attention to drugs that might actually work.” “
2. Who is Peter Kremsner?
“Peter Kremsner of the University of Tübingen agrees hydroxychloroquine “certainly isn’t a wonder drug.” The new results left him “wrestling” with the question of whether to proceed with two hydroxychloroquine trials, one in hospitals and the other in patients with milder illness at home.”
"On 5 June, researchers in the United Kingdom announced the results from the largest trial yet, Recovery, in a press release.
In a group of 1542 hospitalized patients treated with hydroxychloroquine, 25.7% had died after 28 days, compared with 23.5% in a group of 3132 patients who had only received standard care.
“These data convincingly rule out any meaningful mortality benefit,” wrote the investigators, who ended the study early and promised to publish the full results as soon as possible."
"Another hope for hydroxychloroquine, that it might prevent people exposed to the virus from getting sick, also faded last week when David Boulware of the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, and colleagues published the results of the largest study to date of this strategy, called postexposure prophylaxis (PEP).
The researchers sent either hydroxychloroquine or a placebo by mail to 821 people who had been in close contact with a COVID-19 patient for more than 10 minutes without proper protection.
They reported in The New England Journal of Medicine that 12% of the people who took the drug went on to develop COVID-19 symptoms, versus 14% in a placebo group, a difference that was not statistically significant.
"A second large PEP trial has come up empty as well, its leader tells Science.
Carried out in Barcelona, Spain, that study randomized more than 2300 people exposed to the virus to either hydroxychloroquine or the usual care.
There was no significant difference between the number of people in each group who developed COVID-19, says Oriol Mitjà of the Germans Trias i Pujol University Hospital. Mitjà says he has submitted the results for publication."
HCQ is not supposed to be a treatment of last resort for hospitalized patients at death's door. but a treatment of first resort at the first signs of the virus -- like the anti-viral Tamiflu.