seacoaster wrote: ↑Tue Aug 25, 2020 2:27 pm
What's a little intrusion of political hackery into science? It's hard to imagine this Administration exaggerating the benefits of an unproven therapy, right?
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/24/heal ... ticleShare
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At a news conference on Sunday announcing the emergency approval of blood plasma for hospitalized Covid-19 patients, President Trump and two of his top health officials cited the same statistic: that the treatment had reduced deaths by 35 percent.
Mr. Trump called it a “tremendous” number. His health and human services secretary, Alex M. Azar II, a former pharmaceutical executive, said, “I don’t want you to gloss over this number.” And Dr. Stephen M. Hahn, the commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, said 35 out of 100 Covid-19 patients “would have been saved because of the administration of plasma.”
But scientists were taken aback by the way the administration framed this data, which appeared to have been calculated based on a small subgroup of hospitalized Covid-19 patients in a Mayo Clinic study: those who were under 80 years old, not on ventilators and received plasma known to contain high levels of virus-fighting antibodies within three days of diagnosis.
What’s more, many experts — including a scientist who worked on the Mayo Clinic study — were bewildered about where the statistic came from. The number was not mentioned in the official authorization letter issued by the agency, nor was it in a 17-page memo written by F.D.A. scientists. It was not in an analysis conducted by the Mayo Clinic that has been frequently cited by the administration.
“For the first time ever, I feel like official people in communications and people at the F.D.A. grossly misrepresented data about a therapy,” said Dr. Walid Gellad, who leads the Center for Pharmaceutical Policy and Prescribing at the University of Pittsburgh.
It is especially worrisome, he said, given concerns over how Mr. Trump has appeared to politicize the process of approving treatments and vaccines for the coronavirus. Over the next couple of months, as data emerges from vaccine clinical trials, the safety of potentially millions of people will rely on the scientific judgment of the F.D.A. “That’s a problem if they’re starting to exaggerate data,” Dr. Gellad said. “That’s the big problem.”
AHHH a difference of opinion.
Heres another
“Available evidence of efficacy of HCQ+AZ has been repeatedly described in the media as “anecdotal,” but most certainly is not.”
A new article to be published by Oxford University Press, on behalf of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, calls for hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin to be made widely available and promoted immediately for physicians, to be prescribed for early outpatient treatment.
The article, titled “Early Outpatient Treatment of Symptomatic, High-Risk Covid-19 Patients that Should be Ramped-Up Immediately as Key to the Pandemic Crisis,” is authored by Professor Harvey Risch, MD, from Yale University.
“There is a small chance that it may not work. But the urgency demands that we at least start to take that risk and evaluate what happens, and if our situation does not improve we can stop it …”
“… but we will know that we did everything that we could
instead of sitting by and letting hundreds of thousands die because we did not have the courage to act according to our rational calculations.”
