Posted on 04/13/2020 3:21:05 PM PDT by Pining_4_TX
On Saturday the Food and Drug Administration approved the use of two antimalarial drugs, hydroxychloroquine and a related medication, chloroquine, for emergency use to treat COVID-19. The drugs were touted by President Trump as a “game changer” for COVID-19.
However, a study just published in a French medical journal provides new evidence that hydroxychloroquine does not appear to help the immune system clear the coronavirus from the body. The study comes on the heels of two others - one in France and one in China - that reported some benefits in the combination of hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin for COVID-19 patients who didn’t have severe symptoms of the virus.
I am a medicinal chemist who has specialized in discovery and development of antiviral drugs for the past 30 years, and I have been actively working on coronaviruses for the past seven. I am among a number of researchers who are concerned that this drug has been given too much of a high priority before there is enough evidence to show it is indeed effective.
There are already other clinical studies that showed it is not effective against COVID-19 as well as several other viruses. And, more importantly, it can have dangerous side effects, as well as giving people false hope. The latter has led to widespread shortages of hydroxychloroquine for patients who need it to treat malaria, lupus and rheumatoid arthritis, the indications for which it was originally approved.
(Excerpt) Read more at acsh.org ...
An awful lot of studies are designed to fail.
They did not use Zinc and maybe they didn’t need to as the French diet is Zinc-rich compared to the American diet which is generally Zinc-poor.
When we have trials in the US, we need to include Zinc in the treatment combination because our blood plasma levels are low in Zinc to begin with (on average compared to the French). So you’re right to be concerned here but there is another reason (discussed next paragraph) this study was a failure and we need to know how such studies can fail here. We know there are sick liberals in this country that want hydroxychloroquine treatment to fail. How do you get hydroxychloroquine treatment to fail or have mixed results and therefore not generally effective? You eliminate Zinc.
But the reason that every one of their patients dies is because they were dying from something else when they came in.
Look at the comorbidities they list as quoted in the bottom bold section of #78 above. These people were beyond sick to begin with and went to the hospital to die. The hospital took them in, diagnosed them for COVID-19 and tried to save these patients who were dying from other causes by treating them with hydroxychloroquine.
The analogy I gave in #78 above drives the point home:
“It’s analogous to a ridiculous example of conducting a small ‘study’ on 11 severely addicted nearly dead heroin users trying to get them free of their acid reflux disease by having them drink 2 liters of buttermilk every day for a week. And then when the sick addicts kick the bucket, the study investigator writes the buttermilk was ineffective in curing the acid reflux.”
It’s at that level. Garbage.
When we have healthy people unable to breath from COVID-19 come into our hospitals/clinics and they are given Hydrochloroquine plus Zinc, they recover very well. If they eat a lot of seafood so that their blood plasma levels of Zinc are good, then the Zinc in the treatment is probably not necessary. The Azithromycin or Doxycyclin is there to mostly fend off any bacterial problems.
But if they are dying from something else when they come in, there is very little chance they are going to survive.
You quoted the study:
95% confidence interval: 49-94
If I understand correctly, this means that, if one were to repeat the study 20 times, the 80% result could range anywhere from 49% to 94% in 19 of the repeats and could be outside that range of 49 to 94 in one of the repeats.
I don't recall seeing such a large confidence interval before. But I am an engineer. Such uncertainties would be unacceptable in an engineered system that one expected to operate as required.
It may not be a “lefty” site but she’s a lefty. This “study” answers a question that’s not being asked. The study says that it doesn’t eliminate Covid from the body. Who cares? It negates the negative and destructive effect of Covid IF GIVEN WITH ZINC.
That post of yours just made me grin...I can see your mom walking in and seeing this...
Well, at least it wasn’t some kind of dirty picture or cussword...:)
(or was it?)
Put this self aggrandizing ‘expert’s’ little fear mongering alongside the tens of thousands who have now received HCQ and sloughed off the beta test virus. This dweeb is seeking affirmation, not truth.
Well stated! expect more of this ‘pooping on HCQ as Gates sends out his tattooed flunkies trying to prevent the President issuing an EO for release of HCQ and zinc to be written by anyphysician not just those treating vernted folks in hospitals. Gates is satan’s power crazed little helper.
It is the body’s immune system which eliminates a virus from the body. This fraud is posing her fake study as if HCQ is expected to eliminate the virus, which if she was an honest doctor she would know not to insinuate such garbage.
It has nothing to do with “fighting the virus.” The drug works in protecting the body from the freed iron particles that flow dangerously around the body. Like in malaria. That is how it works. So there is no point in “seeing if it kills viruses.” It helps prevent the deaths due to the destructive behavior of freed iron. It doesn’t do anything to the actual virus cells.
bet she’d take the Trump Treatment in a heartbeat if she was gasping for breath in an ICU because of a C-19 infection ...
“HCQ is *not* intended as a virus killer. The purpose is to reduce the ability of the Corona virus to replicate in the patient.”
there are no “virus killers”: all antivirals inhibit replication so the body can kill existing viruses without being overwhelmed with insurmountable new numbers ... that’s why ALL antivirals MUST be taken early in an infection to be effective ... think tamiflu during the first 24-48 hours of influenza symptoms or famciclovir during the first 24-48 hours of a shingles infection ..
No!
You’re posting it to help discredit the president of the United States.
ROFL...
We dont believe you.
Dont believe the fake study either.
Hillary, you should know better than this!
I can tell you from decades of experience, and others like me will say the same, that a clinical study of only 11 patients is not going to achieve any sort of statistical power to claim any sort of confidence interval worthy of publication.
Analogy:
There is multiple choice question on an exam containing 4 answers. There is only one correct answer out of the four.
One can say they have an answer, but is it the correct answer?
This is not a trivial question when it comes to media. The media people of today will take anybody that seems related to a science center who says they have an ‘answer’ and run with it. The correctness of the answer may not even be questioned. Such was the study of the 11 very sick patients here.
If a person is blindfolded and chooses an answer from the 4, their chance of choosing the correct answer is 25%, 1 out of 4.
If ten such questions are answered randomly, the probability of answering all correctly is (0.25) x (0.25) x (0.25) ... x (0.25), ten times ~ zero, the probability is virtually zero.
If a randomized trial gets 8 right, 2 wrong, with nothing special in the way of treatment, the probability of this is (0.25) x (0.25) x (0.25) ..., eight times, x (0.75) x (0.75) times permutations 10 choose 8, ~ zero, the probability is still virtually zero.
After repeated high success trials (experiments, games), a referee will blow the whistle and call the game in favor of a presence of expertise, in favor of the success being a result of expertise and not random luck. The trials indicate there’s an expert in there somewhere.
In the drug world, we say there’s a treatment effect = expert on the scene. The drug has expertise meaning some sort of mechanism of action. Mechanism of action is seed for more basic research, it’s the holy grail of medical molecular research. This is where bioengneering meets manageable or tractable variation.
There is a confidence interval in this but with such a small sample, the CI is meaningless.
Clinical staff will often throw in a CI calculated from a statistics computer program/app written for non statistical users who barely know what it means. Statistics is the one subject that medical staff including most MDs will run away from.
A CI as a random variable, can distribute itself in wide variation but with repeated experiments will tend to hover within 2 standard deviations of its mean, as would any random variable without heavy tails.
If a drug combo therapy is so successful it is described as a cure, then the number of CIs needed to form a CI distribution with an accurate meta CI, will be small. What does this mean? It means the standard error is small and the standard mean is pointed like a normalized impulse function.
If a drug combo therapy yields mixed results, then usually a trial will chase subgroup analysis which is fraught with finding a statistically significant correlation by luck because ... too many subgroups. This is what clutters up most medical journals unless there’s a powerful investigator personality involved who has philosophical and scientific insight. They will adjust the experiment to hone in on why the response rate is mixed and go in directions where the non-response is understood and minimized.
For example, non-hodgkin lymphoma had about 20 years ago a great drug treatment in which 60% of patients went into remission and recovered completely whereas 40% died miserable deaths.
The 40% non-response was followed up with a circus of subgroup investigations all looking for discernible variables that would explain the non-response. Gender, ethnicity, diet, age, location, income, happiness quotient (whatever that is), recreational drug use, etc ad infinitum. A cottage industry was formed where medical journals routinely published the next study finding a miracle correlation among some subgroup somewhere.
It became an exercise in medical astrology.
Enter bioengineering in the form of genomic sequencing.
The genomes of respondents and non-respondents were sequenced, then compared with each other. The vast number of genes were not understood in terms of function, didn’t have names, they were given alphanumeric designators much like stars in a galaxy.
But then a clever molecular biologist and statistician added gene expression data for each of the sequenced genes. The expression levels represented how much mRNA each gene was producing. Expression levels change with external conditions. For example, you get hungry, your genome swings into a different gene expression profile. You get fed, the profile swings back. You drink vodka .....
So the genes aren’t just sitting there looking pretty. They are constantly changing. Get hot, they respond, get cold they respond in a different way. Get a girlfriend .... never mind.
Take hydroxychloroquine, they change.
So our clever molecular biologist and statistician put the expression levels on a grand histogram and compared the histogram for those who responded to treatment with the histogram for those who didn’t respond (non-respondents).
Voila, two spikes corresponding to two genes expressing in the non-respondent group were clearly much larger than in the group that responded to the drug.
The genes were unknown in the sense that like ..,. what do they do? Why are they there? Why does a cell need them? How do they express in different cells?
A pharmaceutical chemist and molecular modeler were brought in to see how the wonder drug molecule could be modified for the non-respondents based on the overactive expression levels of these two mysterious genes. Molecular modelers are basically rocket scientists in the nano world. They have vast databases of small molecules with 3D structures discovered by crystallography scanners. They orbit the molecules around receptors and dock the molecules into the receptor packets or they try to via simulation software.
So this is general bioengineering. If you’re an engineer looking for a new venue, you would be welcome in the world of bioengineering, Lots of powerful minds like Nobel laureate caliber medical and microbio scientists and MDs would welcome you into the fold to help remove the astrology from the field.
Epidemiologists can help narrow where to look for cures and solutions, but bioengineering is where it’s at.
What’s going to happen with SARS-COV-2 after the pandemic passes, it’s going to be studied for decades to come to pin down its mechanism of action using novel bioengineeering tools. Its cousins will be studied as well.
The engineering of the virus, its HIV encoded segments, its glycoprotein wrappers and concealment structure will be investigated to build a case for deliberate attack on the world to shut it down. We can speculate for years to come. Ordinarily, I would think it would go into a new mystery bin similar to the JFK assassination, but in this era of the Great Awakening of people all over the planet, I’m not so sure anymore that a coverup will succeed.
Well let’s just ban chemotherapy, then, because it doesn’t cure all cancer patients, and has been known to kill others directly.
11 patients give me a break!!
Sounds more like someone trying to protect the company's ability to make a killing off a "brand-new, specially designed, expensive enough to lure the designer sneaker crowd, drug"...
He just gave it away with that statement. Leftist talking point.
:)
“However, a study just published in a French medical journal provides new evidence that hydroxychloroquine does not appear to help the immune system clear the coronavirus from the body.”
Well, I imagine it depends on what “clear the coronavirus from the body” means. If a medicine indirectly works against the worst side effects of a virus, enhancing the body’s resistance to the virus, to the point that the immune system fights it off, is that not clearing the system of the virus, even if the medicine did not DIRECTLY attack the virus?
The latest from Raoult on 4/10 includes 1061 patients, with good results (shown elsewhere in this thread). That number has more than doubled since 4/10.
Interesting that the author is a woman from Univ. of Maryland at Baltimore. NBCNews published a hagiography of a black female chemist from the same campus who is working on fast-tracking a vaccine for Covid-19.
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