Hydroxychloroquine, now a major scientific scandal.

 

"Just keep going, it'll be okay!"

 

You will recall that several highly promoted studies in big medical journals were recently retracted. That story has not gone away, despite being ignored by the media.

It sounds absurd that an obscure US company with a hastily constructed website could have driven international health policy and brought major clinical trials to a halt within the span of a few weeks. Yet that's what happened earlier this year, when Illinois-based Surgisphere Corporation began a publishing spree that would trigger one of the largest scientific scandals of the COVID-19 pandemic to date.

At the heart of the deception was a paper published in The Lancet on May 22 that suggested hydroxychloroquine, an antimalarial drug promoted by US President Donald Trump and others as a therapy for COVID-19, was associated with an increased risk of death in patients hospitalized with the disease. The study wasn't a randomized controlled trial—the gold standard for determining a drug's safety and efficacy—but it did purportedly draw from an enormous registry of observational data that Surgisphere claimed to have collected from the electronic medical records of nearly 100,000 COVID-19 patients across 671 hospitals on six continents.

The article is long, and goes on to expose the fraud and stupidity of the medical literature establishment in considerable detail. Certainly worth a read just to get the straight goods on what happened.

But even here the Trump Derangement Syndrome is coming in. "...an antimalarial drug promoted by US President Donald Trump and others as a therapy for COVID-19..." Well, I saw that news conference. Mr. Trump was not promoting the drug. He mentioned it as being a possibility. He said it "looked good" as a potential treatment. As soon as he mentioned it in an approving manner, reporters were up in his face demanding "How do you know? You're not a doctor!"

Following that the news media made killing that treatment a holy crusade. The medical journals gleefully signed on. Because Trump liked it. No other reason.