Flawed coronavirus studies

See also: Hydroxychloroquine denial See also: The Science Behind Hydroxychloroquine and the Mainstream Media's Treatment of it.

Flawed coronavirus treatment studies are being promoted by the mainstream media as a way to disparage the effective treatment of hydroxychloroquine.

Among the flaws in these studies are:

• Preferentially using hydroxychloroquine to treat the sickest patients (when compared to the control group)
• Faked Data
• Giving hydroxychloroquine in toxic doses
• Delayed initiation of treatment
• Varied initiation of treatment
• A lack of testing for SARS-CoV-2 in outpatients
• Not having a large enough sample size to achieve statistical significance.

Depending on which study the media cites to discourage the use of hydroxychloroquine, the studies have one or more of these flaws.

The VA study

Outcomes of hydroxychloroquine usage in United States veterans hospitalized with Covid-19, also known as the VA study, was one of the first studies to suggest that the use of hydroxychloroquine could be harmful. The paper's results said there were 27 deaths (27.8%) in the HCQ group, 25 deaths (22.1%) in the HCQ + azithromycin group, and 18 deaths (11.4%) in the no HCQ group. The first flaw was that it was a small study. It only had 368 patients and small studies are more prone to errors than larger ones. The second flaw was that it delayed treatment with hydroxychloroquine... the drug works best when it is given early in the disease progression. The third and most egregious flaw was that it was giving hydroxychloroquine preferentially to the sickest patients.

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Baseline demographic and comorbidity characteristics were comparable across the three treatment groups. However, hydroxychloroquine, with or without azithromycin, was more likely to be prescribed to patients with more severe disease, as assessed by baseline ventilatory status and metabolic and hematologic parameters. Thus, as expected, increased mortality was observed in patients treated with hydroxychloroquine, both with and without azithromycin.

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If one gives hydroxychloroquine preferentially to the sickest patients when compared to the control group, then the fact that more patients died when they were given hydroxychloroquine should be unsurprising.

Lancet study

Hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine with or without a macrolide for treatment of COVID-19: a multinational registry analysis, also known as Surgisphere, was one of the next studies to suggest that hydroxychloroquine was harmful. According to its authors, hydroxychloroquine had a 18% mortality rate when used to treat COVID-19 and the mortality rate raised to 23.8% when it was combined with an antibiotic, whereas the control group only had a 9.3% mortality rate. The main problem with this study was that it was a complete fraud. The following is a partial list of its flaws.

• No reproducibility
• No traceability of the data
• No transparency of the review
• Data was too "clean" to have occurred naturally
• Impossible to collect the data in the way the researchers claimed without violating privacy laws
• Not enough authors to conduct a study of its size
• Too many Australian deaths... it's data claimed to have recorded 73 Australian deaths by April 21 but the number of COVID-19 deaths in Australia didn't reach 73 until April 23.}}
• Not adhering to standard practices in the machine learning and statistics community
• Implausible ratios of chloroquine to hydroxychloroquine use
• Mean daily doses of hydroxychloroquine that are 100 mg higher than FDA recommendations.

The RECOVERY Trial

One of the most commonly cited studies by the media is the UK's RECOVERY trial. This trial gave the drug in hospitalized patients which is a bit late to be giving the drug, although studies such as the ones conducted at Mount Sanai hospital and the Henry Ford hospital system have shown that hydroxychloroquine can reduce the number of deaths in those patients by about 50%. The RECOVERY trial's biggest flaw was that it used toxic levels of the drug... the maximum recommended dose for hydroxychloroquine is 800 mg per day and the RECOVERY trial used a daily dose of 2400 mg, a dose that is three times higher!

It goes without saying that when you give the wrong dose of a drug, bad things happen. Perhaps the only surprising thing about this trial is that the hydroxychloroquine deaths weren't much higher than the people who weren't given the drug.

Observational Study of Hydroxychloroquine in Hospitalized Patients with Covid-19

This study authored by Geleris is a retrospective study commonly cited in the media that analyzed patient data from the New York–Presbyterian Hospital (NYP)–Columbia University Irving Medical Center (CUIMC). The following are inherent problems in this study.

• Hydroxychloroquine was given late.}
• The treatment with hydroxychloroquine varied depending on which doctor was seen.
• It was given to sicker patients preferentially (when compared to the control group).

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Hydroxychloroquine-treated patients were more severely ill at baseline than those who did not receive hydroxychloroquine (median ratio of partial pressure of arterial oxygen to the fraction of inspired oxygen, 223 vs. 360).

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Association of Treatment With Hydroxychloroquine or Azithromycin With In-Hospital Mortality in Patients With COVID-19 in New York State

This study authored by Rosenberg is another retrospective study commonly cited by the media. It analyzed the data from 25 different hospitals in the New York area. The following were problems with this study.

• The treatment with hydroxychloroquine varied depending on which doctor was seen.
• It was given to sicker patients preferentially (when compared to the control group).

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Those receiving hydroxychloroquine, azithromycin, or both were more likely than those not receiving either drug to have diabetes, respiratory rate >22/min, abnormal chest imaging findings, O2 saturation lower than 90%, and aspartate aminotransferase greater than 40 U/L.

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