Scientific misconduct? Laura Ingraham shreds media fawning over weak study that pans Hydroxychloroquine

After weeks of ignoring testimony from doctors speaking about the positive effects of hydroxychloroquine as it pertains to treating coronavirus patients, and after ignoring at least one peer-reviewed study that demonstrated these same effects, members of the left-wing media are in an uproar over a single non-peer-reviewed study that belies these prior findings.

“A malaria drug widely touted by President Donald Trump for treating the new coronavirus showed no benefit in a large analysis of its use in U.S. veterans hospitals. There were more deaths among those given hydroxychloroquine versus standard care,” the Associated Press reported Tuesday, citing a new study.

However, the AP warned that the study “was not a rigorous experiment” and had not yet “been reviewed by other scientists.”

Nevertheless, within minutes of this news breaking, condemnations against anyone who had touted the potential of hydroxychloroquine began pouring in from left-wing media stars.

Fox News host Laura Ingraham eventually responded to this partisan sniping, which is being repeated nonstop on mainstream airways, later Wednesday evening.

In an eight-minute-long segment, she disputed the left’s veritable propaganda by citing all the counter-facts that the left-wing press have conveniently ignored.

For instance, she noted, “A survey or study released yesterday on hydroxychloroquine for use on COVID patients is shockingly irresponsible and, as top virologists are saying, perhaps even agenda-driven.”

In a tweet posted earlier Wednesday, world-renowned physician and microbiologist Dr. Didier Raoult, MD, PhD, accused the study of containing “three major biases that invalidate its conclusions.”

A Google translation of his tweet reads as follows: “The study published in pre-print on 21/04 on Medrxiv by Maganoli et al contains three major biases that invalidate its conclusions, in any case absurd and incompatible with the literature. We have detailed these biases in the letter below.”

“Maganoli” refers to Dr. Joseph Magagnoli, the lead researcher on the team that conducted the study.

After playing clips of left-wing media stars such as CNN chief media correspondent and political commentator Brian Stelter disparaging Fox News’ credibility (ironically enough) over its continued interest in hydroxychloroquine as a potential coronavirus cure, Ingraham then turned to Raoult ‘s own findings.

“Renowned French virologist Dr. Didier Raoult released his own study on hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin just a few weeks ago. It demonstrated 91 percent effectiveness in more than 1,000 patients, with zero side effects,” she said.

This is true, though this study was conveniently ignored by the left-wing press, which predictably chose to smear Raoult — never mind that his peer-reviewed study involved far more patients than Magagnoli’s study, which reportedly involved only 368 patients.

“Well today, that same professor, who’s a renowned infectious disease expert, released a devastating response to the researchers who looked at the Veterans Affairs patients,” Ingraham continued.

“In the current period, it seems that passion dominates rigorous and balanced scientific analysis and may lead to scientific misconduct. The article by Magagnoli et al. (Magagnoli, 2020) is an absolutely spectacular example of this,” Raoult wrote.

“Indeed, in this work, it is concluded, in the end, that hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) would double the mortality in patients with COVID with a fatality rate of 28% (versus 11% in the NoHCQ group), which is extraordinarily hard to believe.”

Raoult cited three notable biases, including the fact that “the ‘untreated’ group actually received azithromycin in 30% of cases, without this group being analyzed in any distinct way. Azithromycin is also a proposed treatment for COVID (Gautret, 2020) with in vitro efficacy (Andreani, 2020), and to mix it with patients who are supposedly untreated is something that is closer to scientific fraud than reasonable analysis.”

“Altogether these 3 voluntary biases are all pushing to the idea of dangerosity of hydroxychloroquine safest drug as reported on nearly 1 million people (Lane, 2020),” his letter concluded. “All in all, this is a work that shows that, in this period, it is possible to propose things that do not stand up to any methodological analysis to try to demonstrate that one is right.”

All of this isn’t to say that hydroxychloroquine is or isn’t beneficial. Nobody, including Ingraham, has stated that it is beneficial. They have however suggested that yes, there may be some benefits to it, and more studies would, therefore, be useful.

“Like many others, I agree that wider studies, of course, they should be conducted,” Ingraham noted. “They should be ongoing to determine the efficacy of this drug and any.”

The problem is that, just as the left-wing media choose to only consider the perspectives of scientists and doctors whose findings benefit their preferred narrative, so too they choose to only consider those studies that benefit their preferred narrative.

“But why deny or even mention the positive results from legitimate studies in favor of the shoddy surveys like the one we just discussed?” Ingraham continued.

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There is one goal with this virus, immunity, but three ways to reach it as a society:

1) Open everything up and let all who will get infected catch the virus (Sweden is trying that, it's called herd immunity; it would definitely solve the SS shortfall problem looming)
2) Keep everything locked down and wait until a vaccine is proven to yield immunity (and even an effective vaccine is only about sixty percent effective in yielding immunity on an individual basis; plus vaccines have scary side effects and this one coming will have a Gates data dot for everyone who gets it side effect)
3) Make a drug cocktail like HCQ + Doxycycline + zinc supplementation available (without restriction to hospitals only), so every physician and physician's assistant can write the scripts at first sign of a symptom and open the nation up to go back to being GREAT.

Since it is the human body immune system which defeats any virus that is defeated, reducing the viral load and keeping inflammation down is the best way to give the immune system a shot at developing immunity.

Hydroxychloroquine appears to have two sides to its efficacy: a) the drug has been proven as an inflammation reducer (used in RA and Lupus, and now with covid patients to reduce their airway inflammation); b) Hydroxychloroquine is a proven ionophore, ferrying ZINC into the infected cells where ZINC works to stop the viral replication thus reducing viral load.

So which of the three ways to have immunity in a society do you think the globalist oligarchy has in mind for America? And which of the three means to immunity do you think saves people and the last great hope for humanity, America?

Response to Magagnoli, MedRxiv, 2020

Matthieu MILLION1,2, Yanis ROUSSEL 1,2, Didier RAOULT 1,2
1

IHU-Méditerranée Infection, Marseille, France
2

Aix Marseille Univ, IRD, AP-HM, MEPHI, Marseille, France

In the current period, it seems that passion dominates rigorous and balanced scientific analysis and may lead to scientific misconduct. The article by Magagnoli et al. (Magagnoli, 2020) is an absolutely spectacular example of this. Indeed, in this work, it is concluded, in the end, that hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) would double the mortality in patients with COVID with a fatality rate of 28% (versus 11% in the NoHCQ group), which is extraordinarily hard to believe. The analysis of the data shows two major
biases, which show a welling to be convinced before starting the work :

The first is that lymphopenia is twice as common in the HCQ groups (25% in the HCQ, 31% in the HCQ+AZ group versus 14% in the no HCQ group, p =.02) and there is an absolute correlation between lymphopenia (<0.5G/L) and fatality rate, which is well known (Tan, 2020) and confirmed here : 28% deaths, 22% and 11% in the HCQ, HCQ+AZ and No HCQ group, respectively. Lymphopenia is the most obvious criterion of patient severity (in our cohort, lymphocytes in dead individuals (n=22, mean ±
standard deviation, 0.94 ± 0.45), versus in the living (n=2405, 1.79 ± 0.84, p < .0001)). As the authors acknowledge, the severity of the patients in the different groups was very different, and their analysis can only make sense if there is a selection of patients with the same degree of severity, i.e.
the same percentage of lymphopenia.

The second major bias is that in an attempt to provide meaningful data, by eliminating the initial severity at the time of treatment, two tables are shown: one table where drugs are prescribed before intubation, and which shows no significant difference in the 3 different groups (9/90 (10%) in the HCQ group, 11/101 (10. 9%) HCQ+AZ, and 15/177 (8.5%) in the group without HCQ, chi-square = 0.47, ddl = 2, p = 0.79), and one table, where it is not clear when the drugs were prescribed, where there are significant differences. These differences are most likely related to the fact that the patients had been intubated for some before receiving hydroxychloroquine in desperation. It is
notable that this is unreasonable at the time of the cytokine storm, as it is unlikely that hydrochloroquine alone would be able to control patients at this stage of the disease.

Moreover, incomprehensibly, the “untreated” group actually received azithromycin in 30% of cases, without this group being analyzed in any distinct way. Azithromycin is also a proposed treatment for COVID (Gautret, 2020) with in vitro efficacy (Andreani, 2020), and to mix it with patients who are
supposedly untreated is something that is closer to scientific fraud than reasonable analysis.

Altogether these 3 voluntary biases are all pushing to the idea of dangerosity of hydroxychloroquine safest drug as reported on nearly 1 million people (Lane, 2020).

All in all, this is a work that shows that, in this period, it is possible to propose things that do not stand up to any methodological analysis to try to demonstrate that one is right.

____________________________________________________________________________

References

Andreani J, Le Bideau M, Duflot I, Jardot P, Rolland C, Boxberger M, Wurtz N, Rolain JM, Colson P, La Scola B, Raoult D. In vitro testing of combined Hydroxychloroquine and Azithromycin on SARS-CoV-2 shows synergistic effect. Microbial pathogenesis. 2020. In press.

Gautret P, Lagier JC, Parola P, Hoang VT, Meddeb L, Mailhe M, Doudier B, Courjon J, Giordanengo V, Vieira VE, Dupont HT, Honoré S, Colson P, Chabrière E, La Scola B, Rolain JM, Brouqui P, Raoult D.
Hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin as a treatment of COVID-19: results of an open-label nonrandomized clinical trial. Int J Antimicrob Agents. 2020 Mar 20:105949. doi:
10.1016/j.ijantimicag.2020.105949.

Lane JCE, Weaver J, Kostka K, et al. Safety of hydroxychloroquine, alone and in combination with azithromycin, in light of rapid wide-spread use for COVID-19: a multinational, network cohort and self-controlled case series study. medRxiv 2020.04.08.20054551; doi:
https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.04.08.20054551

Magagnoli J, Narendran S, Pereira F, Cummings T, Hardin JW, Sutton SS, Ambati J. Outcomes of hydroxychloroquine usage in United States veterans hospitalized with Covid-19. medRxiv 2020.04.16.20065920; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.04.16.20065920

Tan, L., Wang, Q., Zhang, D. et al. Lymphopenia predicts disease severity of COVID-19: a descriptive and predictive study. Sig Transduct Target Ther 5, 33 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41392-020-0148-4

Dr Rault's response of 22 April 2020, English: Response to Magagnoli MedRxiv, 2020
PDF Link here

Selected points:

"In the current period, it seems that passion dominates rigorous and balanced scientific analysis and may lead to scientific misconduct. Thearticle by Magagnoli et al. (Magagnoli, 2020) is an absolutely spectacular example of this."

"The first is that lymphopenia is twice as common in the HCQ groups (25% in the HCQ, 31% in the HCQ+AZ group versus 14% in the no HCQ group, p =.02) and there is an absolute correlation between lymphopenia(<0.5G/L) and fatality rate, which is well known "

"The second major bias is that in an attempt to provide meaningful data, by eliminating the initial severity at the time of treatment, two tables are shown: one table where drugs are prescribed before intubation, ... These differences are most likely related to the fact that the patients had been intubated for some before receiving hydroxychloroquine in desperation."

"Moreover, incomprehensibly, the “untreated”group actually received azithromycin in 30% of cases, without this group being analyzed in any distinct way. Azithromycin is also a proposed treatment for COVID(Gautret, 2020)with in vitro efficacy (Andreani, 2020), and to mix it with patients who are supposedly untreated is something that is closer to scientific fraud than reasonable analysis."

Altogether these 3 voluntary biases are all pushing to the idea of dangerosity of hydroxychloroquine safest drug as reported on nearly 1 million people (Lane, 2020)."

"All in all, this is a work that shows that, in this period, it is possible to propose things that do not stand up to any methodological analysis to try to demonstrate that one is right."

Summary (hopefully correct):
Test group was already at high risk of death with covid-19 regardless of care.
Many in test group were intubated, which usually means death regardless of care.
The control group was not much of a control group.

Conclusion:
Dr. Rault is very good at his job.

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