Posted on 04/15/2020 7:56:16 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
A drug that’s been touted by President Donald Trump as a “game changer” didn’t help hospitalized patients with coronavirus and was associated with heart complications, according to a new study.
“This provides evidence that hydroxychloroquine does not apparently treat patients with Covid 19,” said Dr. Paul Offit, an infectious disease specialist at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. “Even worse, there were side effects caused by the drug — heart toxicities that required it be discontinued.”
Trump has said that hydroxychloroquine shows “tremendous promise” and has made it sound like the drug is harmless.
“I think it’s going to be great,” Trump said at a White House briefing on March 19.
“What do you have to lose? Take it,” he said on April 4.
Physicians have warned that while Trump is enthusiastic about the drug, it still needs to be studied to see if it works and if it’s safe.
“People can claim what they want, but the proof is in the pudding, and this is the pudding,” Offit said.
In the French study, doctors looked back at medical records for 181 patients with Covid-19 who had pneumonia and required supplemental oxygen. About half had taken hydroxychloroquine within 48 hours of being admitted to the hospital, and the other half had not.
The doctors followed the patients and found there was no statistically significant difference in the death rates of the two groups, or their chances of being admitted to the intensive care unit.
The study also raised important safety concerns about hydroxychloroquine.
In the study, eight patients who took the drug developed abnormal heart rhythms and had to stop taking it.
Abnormal heart rhythms are a known side effect of hydroxychloroquine, which has been used for decades to treat patients with diseases such as malaria, lupus and rheumatoid arthritis.
Doctors in Sweden and Brazil have sounded warnings about chloroquine, a very similar drug, because of heart problems.
In the new study, among the 84 patients who took hydroxychloroquine, 20.2% were admitted to the ICU or died within seven days of taking the drug. Among the 97 patients who did not take the drug, 22.1% went to the ICU or died.
The difference was not determined to be statistically different
Looking just at deaths, 2.8% of the patients who took hydroxychloroquine died, and 4.6% of the patients who did not take it died. That difference was also not found to be statistically significant.
“These results do not support the use of [hydroxychloroquine] in patients hospitalised for documented SARSCoV-2-positive hypoxic pneumonia,” the study authors wrote.
The study was published Tuesday on medRxiv.org, a pre-print server founded by Yale University, the journal BMJ and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. Studies published on this website have not been peer reviewed.
That's Dr. Raoult's second study.
https://www.mediterranee-infection.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/COVID-IHU-2-1.pdf
I appreciate the link. Thanks!
Thank-you for the link.
Yes he is. He has made many tens of millions of $$ from vaccines. He has a strong bias against anything that is not a vaccine, and the bias includes a financial bias.
You’re welcome.
Kinda like with Obama stopping the seas from rising.
They do people on high dangerous doses that are known to cause these issues and act surprised, they should be flogged out of the profession
“No evidence of clinical efficacy of hydroxychloroquine in patients hospitalised for COVID-19 infection and requiring oxygen: results of a study using routinely collected data to emulate a target trial”
“We used data collected from routine care of all adults in 4 French hospitals with documented SARS-CoV-2 pneumonia and requiring oxygen >= 2 L/min”
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.10.20060699v1.full.pdf
this study was designed to fail: every medical professional who’s worth their salt KNOWS absolutely that most antivirals are basically only effective when given no later than 48 hours after symptoms appear ... a study constructed like this one would have concluded that ALL anti-influenza antivirals and all anti-shingle antivirals were ineffective ...
++++++++1!
It’s a retrospective study with people having comorbidities. Right off the bat it’s flawed.
More importantly it’s from CNN which makes things up from whole cloth.
It appears to be neither randomized nor stratified.
The relevant question to ask is what criteria were used to assign a patient to the HCQ group and others to the non-HCQ group?
I’ll do a little arithmetic from CNN’s report to see if we can understand what’s going on a little better.
> “In the new study, among the 84 patients who took hydroxychloroquine, 20.2% were admitted to the ICU or died within seven days of taking the drug.”
So note that 17 patients went in the ICU or died who had taken HCQ.
> “Among the 97 patients who did not take the drug, 22.1% went to the ICU or died.”
So note that 21.4 patients went to the ICU or died who had not taken HCQ. Let’s check this arithmetic,
97 x 0.221 = 21.437
I wonder where they got the 0.437 dead or ICU patient from? Is this CNN math?
Let’s move on.
The difference was not determined to be statistically different. Without details on how patients were assigned to HCQ or not, without details about the overlap of ICU patients with patients who died, a statistical test result has no value worthy of publishing. I suspect CNN was doing what CNN does.
> “Looking just at deaths, 2.8% of the patients who took hydroxychloroquine died, and 4.6% of the patients who did not take it died. That difference was also not found to be statistically significant.”
According to CNN’s previous paragraph, there were 181 total patients, 84 on HCQ and 97 not on HCQ. Of these, 17 of the HCQ group went to the ICU or died (overlap was probable but not mentioned) and 21.4 of the non-HCQ went to the ICU or died.
The arithmetic yields:
84 x 0.028 = 2.4 deaths in the HCQ group
97 x 0.046 = 4.5 deaths in the non-HCQ group
Hmmm ... CNN uses some interesting math to come up with fractional deaths. I’m straining my eyes to make sure I see the reported numbers correctly. It’s probably the overlap of patients dying in the ICU. If all patients who died had died in the ICU or all had died outside the ICU, here should be no fractional deaths. There’s likely an overlap not reported.
So this was “Looking just at deaths” which are about 7 deaths (2.4 + 4.5) of a total of 181 patients taking into account those patients that were fractionally dead.
And so it appears that of the total 181 patients there were 181 - 7 = 174 who did not die.
CNN reports these patients had comorbidities and yet most survived.
> “In the study, eight patients who took the drug developed abnormal heart rhythms and had to stop taking it.”
CNN talks of a ‘doctor’ who goes off about heart side effects from HCQ yet says only that HCQ patients developed negative heart side effects, yet there is no mention of negative heart side effects of the non-HCQ group.
Why am I pointing this out? Because all these patients had pneumonia from presumably COVID-19 and how much you wanna bet when you’re struggling to breath, when you’re suffocating you don’t experience a whole lot of heart beating abnormalities?
So CNN reports the HCQ patients with heart problems were taken off HCQ. Well then, how many in the non-HCQ group experienced heart beat problems? How does one do a comparison and how to account for the 8 HCQ ‘dropouts’? That’s about 10% of the HCQ group taken out of the HCQ group. That adds 8 HCQ dropouts to the 97 non-HCQ group. That kind of movement could have am impact but regardless it’s still not worthy of publication because this retrospective study doesn’t pass muster.
I feel like I lost about 40 IQ points reading CNN math.
I should stop now before I get the CNN virus and die.
A few last blurbs from me, this ‘preprint’ went to Yale where a previous garbage study was performed on a handful of severely comorbid patients. Let’s be clear if you are dying of a heart attack or cancer, and you’re brought to the ER and put in the ICU. chances are you are going to die of your heart attack or cancer and if you test positive for SARS-COV-2, nothing is likely to save you. You will likely not die of COVID-19, you will die of your heart attack or cancer. Or if you are suffocating from COVID-19 ARDS and you wait too long to get to the ER and you have severe comorbidities, you are going to die with or without HCQ. Yet the Yale system of satellites is hyping HCQ ineffectiveness even though the studies they have are horribly underpowered, poorly designed, and attached to wild invalid inferences. It’s garbage.
I’ve tried to be as objective as possible without any bias but I just don’t see the ‘rig for failure’ studies here having any scientific merit. There’s just none. If I saw any, I would call it fairly like an umpire who understands very well the strike zone. Every pitch in this study that CNN reported was out of the strike zone or hit with a foul, and they are trying so hard to call it the exact opposite.
We are witnessing scientific misconduct which has over the past two decades entered a ‘tolerance’ zone like transsexism . This was made clear with the global warming misconduct discovering data alteration in East Anglia, with misleading inferences by Michael Mann at NASA, and so many other Gore-level ‘experts’. I fear the science discipline is taking a hit and we are witnessing it here.
Reading the study and looking at the difference in death rates- a relative risk ratio of 0.6 is not significant???? The 95% CI is 0.13. 0.13 is a crazy low relative risk. If the 95% CI requires that low of an RR than 181 is obviously not a large enough sample size. And the “conclusion should have been that-not that HCQ doesn’t show a difference.
Whew! That was an exhaustive but spot on analysis. TDS has infected the MSM to such an extent that they are terminally stupid. Prognosis: fatal
See #52.
I’ve never asked you about CNN.
But nevertheless you missed the point.
The point is there is a ‘preprint’ report that you could have found and posted here. I suppose you could have posted the CNN report of the preprint report alongside the preprint report to show how far off CNN is as we compare the actual clinical report with the CNN interpretation of it.
In my view, there’s no sense to include a CNN report of a clinical report. CNN is totally discredited. So why not just go to the actual original clinical report without involving the used car scam dealers that make up CNN?
But it’s your call.
See #52 if you’re interested where it is shown that CNN is pathetic. What else is new?
Difference between 3 and 4 deaths.
exactly-this is too little too late
“This is Xi-NN” - all the “news” that Xi wants “reported”.
Sorry, sir. We have to wait until two or more pistons seize up in their cylinders before we give you that $2 quart of oil for your engine...
I took this drug for years as I worked in Nigeria. It was for prophylaxis of Malaria. I was not a medical professional then as I was just a geologist working in Nigeria. Malaria sucks.
Today I am a medical professional as a clinical pharmacist, and thankfully retired now. This drug does have side effects as most drugs This drug is used by millions of people in Africa and Asia. Its side effects are well known and rather minor. Malaria truly sucks big time. I had it do to my stupidity of not taking the drug. I was offshore many miles and did not consider a mosquito bite. I was wrong.
It was a hell of a diet. A few hours in bed with blankets over me and shivering. A few hours after on top of the blankets nude and sweating. The chills and shivers were the worst. After the fever one could sleep for a few hours and it then all started over again. This went on for a few days. I lost 10 pounds in 15 days. I do not recommend this diet.
When the chills and fever were over for a few hours I would go down to the mess hall on the drilling rig. I would ask for nothing except warm rice and butter. I was not hungry but knew I needed food. Oddly I continued to perform my job. I was young and bullet proof then. I am not such now
Malaria Sucks
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