The Briefing Room
General Category => Health/Education => Topic started by: PeteS in CA on July 13, 2020, 07:37:53 pm
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HCQ Helps Contain COVID-19 Cases: New Evidence and a Major Retraction
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/stephen-green/2020/07/13/hcq-helps-contain-covid-19-cases-new-evidence-and-a-major-retraction-n636361 (https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/stephen-green/2020/07/13/hcq-helps-contain-covid-19-cases-new-evidence-and-a-major-retraction-n636361)
The latest positive results come from Vadodara, India, where city officials have conducted a major study involving more than 300,000 people, including “health workers and other frontline staff.â€
The Indian Express reports:
The administration has analysed a sample of over 1 lakh [lakh = 100,000] residents, who were mostly close contacts of positive persons and the effect of HCQ in containing the transmission of the virus. According to the analysis, of the 48,873 close contacts of positive patients who took one dose of HCQ, 102 turned Covid-19 positive and 12 succumbed to the infection whereas 48 of the 17,776 close contacts of positive patients who took two doses of HCQ turned positive and only one died. The study also states that of the 33,563 close contacts of patients who took three HCQ doses, 43 tested positive and one died.
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Judicial Watch’s Tom Fitton noted on Friday that Trump Derangement Syndrome almost certainly cost lives in the fight against COVID-19:
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Also on Friday, Retraction Watch reported that The Lancet, the prestigious Britsh medical journal — had quietly retracted and replaced an anti-HCQ editorial by Christian Funck-Brentano it had published in May.
Vadodara is on India's west coast, about midway between Mumbai and Karachi, Pakistan. If I understand the quote from Indian Express correctly, HCQ was used in the test as either a pre- or post-exposure prophylactic rather than as a treatment. Since the action of HCQ is to hinder or prevent the spread of the virus in the infected or exposed person, this use makes sense. As does using HCQ as a treatment early rather than as something last-ditch as some studies did.
I'll go farther than Fitton. Whether from lack of clear thought or something more sinister, studies that used HCQ on patients in dire straits used it entirely wrong, depriving patients with milder case of a treatment that could have helped them significantly. I have a hard time believing the tests were designed with a lack of clear thought, which leaves ....
Lancet's retraction is of an editorial that was based on a "study" that was retracted several weeks ago.
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Such retractions are uncommon, to say the least.