just watched a commercial tonight put out by “Coronavirus.gov” who used a D.J Khaled as their spokesperson who said essentially
“Stay at home, spend time with your family, that’s the key. If you go outside you are being selfish, and are putting everybody at risk. If you care about your life, Stay Home”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DTqP5vbU3lY
Seriously? So if we open up our front door to go out- we’re ‘being selfish’ and we are putting ‘everyone at risk’ and ‘we will die’?
Hey Khaled- people are committing suicide because they’ve lost their jobs, lost their homes because they can’;tr par rent or pay the bills- they can’t feed their families properly- 99% pf the population is going to survive this virus just fine- your commercial makes it seem that if so much as open a window to the outdoor world, we’ll catch the virus and die- The flu kills 10’s of 1000’s every year- shall we all hide inside every time the flu season rolls around twice a year? Those ofr you who are rich might be able to weather long downtime without a job- but hte vast majority of Americans can’t- and shouldn’t have to since the virus will take less than 2% of the population- so stop scaremongering and shaming people for going outside and living their lives-
25 May: Stat Modeling (Columbia Uni): This controversial hydroxychloroquine paper: What’s Lancet gonna do about it?
Posted by Andrew
Lancet
A recent paper published in the famous/notorious medical journal Lancet reports that hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine increased the risk of in-hospital death by 30% to 40% and increased arrhythmia by a factor of 2 to 5. The study hit the news with the headline, “Antimalarial drug touted by President Trump is linked to increased risk of death in coronavirus patients, study says.” (Meanwhile, Trump says that Columbia is “a liberal, disgraceful institution.” Good thing we still employ Dr. Oz!)…
All this politics . . . in the meantime, this Lancet study has been criticized; see here and here. I have not read the article in detail so I’m not quite sure what to make of the criticisms; I linked to them on Pubpeer in the hope that some experts can join in...
Almost all the press coverage of this study seemed to be taking the Lancet label as a sign of quality...READ ON
FIRST COMMENT:
25 May: ETH: One additional important development: The WHO announced today that they would be temporarily pausing their trial of hydroxychloroquine, citing the results of The Lancet paper.
SECOND COMMENT:
26 May: Zach: It looks like they’ve already restarted it
https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2020/05/25/this-controversial-hydroxychloroquine-paper-whats-lancet-gonna-do-about-it/
26 May: RecoveryTrial.net: Recruitment to the RECOVERY trial continues as planned
Prof Peter Horby and Prof Martin Landray, Chief Investigators of the RECOVERY trial, said ‘We have been working over the weekend to understand the implications of the Mehra paper for the safety and welfare of patients randomised to hydroxychloroquine.
‘On Saturday 23 May, the independent Data Monitoring Committee conducted an urgent review of the data that we have collected so far on the effects of hydroxychloroquine on mortality among patients admitted to hospital with COVID-19. The Committee concluded that there is “no cogent reason to suspend recruitment for safety reasons.”
‘The Committee found that the effects of hydroxychloroquine on mortality reported in the analysis by Mehra were not consistent with those observed in the RECOVERY trial. The Committee therefore recommended that the trial continue recruitment without interruption, a recommendation that was endorsed on Sunday by the MHRA.
‘The conclusion of the Mehra paper is that “Randomised clinical trials will be required before any conclusion can be reached regarding benefit or harm of these agents in COVID-19 patients.” The RECOVERY trial is currently the largest randomised controlled trial of hydroxychloroquine and other potential treatments for COVID-19. Enrolment in this trial is the best way to provide definitive evidence on these drugs.’
https://www.recoverytrial.net/news/recruitment-to-the-recovery-trial-continues-as-planned
25 May: StatModeling: Hydroxychloroquine update
Posted by Andrew
The study only has 4 authors which is weird for a global study in 96,000 patients (and no acknowledgements at the end of the paper). Studies like this in medicine usually would have 50-100 authors (often in some kind of collaborative group). The data come from the “Surgical Outcomes Collaborative”, which is in fact a company. The CEO (Sapan Desai) is the second author. One of the comments on the blog post is “I was surprised to see that the data have not been analyzed using a hierarchical model”. But not only do they not use hierarchical modelling and they do not appear to be adjusting by hospital/country, they also give almost no information about the different hospitals: which countries (just continent level), how the treated vs not treated are distributed across hospitals etc. A previous paper by the same group in NEJM says that they use data from UK hospitals (no private hospitals are treating COVID so must be from the NHS). Who is allowing some random company to use NHS data and publish with no acknowledgments. Another interesting sentence is about patient consent and ethical approval:
We emailed them to ask for the data, in particular to look at the dose effect which I think is key in understanding the results. They got back to us very quickly and said:
“Thanks for your email inquiry. Our data sharing agreements with the various governments, countries and hospitals do not allow us to share data unfortunately. I do wish you all the very best as you continue to perform trials since that is the stance we advocate. All we have said is to cease and desist the off label and unmonitored and uncontrolled use of such therapy in hospitalized patients.”
So unavailable data from unknown origins . . .
Another rather remarkable aspect is how beautifully uniform the aggregated data are across continents: ...
https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2020/05/25/hydroxychloroquine-update/
22 May: PubPeer: Hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine with or without a macrolide for treatment of COVID-19: a multinational registry analysis
The Lancet(2020) - 11 Comments
I have been indirectly accused, ‘anybody who believes “Yada, yada, yada, etc” is a selfish Nazi’. The Left has no shame. (And I have also been accused of being shameless for not wearing a mask at all times)