Three authors retract study on hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine
thelancet.com
thelancet.com
The lone one who chose not to retract the paper was him.
I recommend this twitter thread that explains the thrust of the issue: https://twitter.com/reverendofdoubt/status/12669029690454630...
Essentially, doubt began swirling around when this company claimed to acquire in a very short time massive amounts of EHR (Electronic Health Record, basically large datasets showing how patients are doing, how they're responding to medication, etc.). When Sapan Desai was pressed on by the other three authors of this very paper, he refused to cooperate, invoking a somewhat shoddy defense of not being at liberty to reveal sensitive information. Surgisphere refuses to say which hospitals chose to give it the EHR.
The thing is, this EHR data is a big deal. Pharma companies give _big_ money to hospitals for this data. One of the key questions has been how this newcomer company managed to acquire these EHR deals with such a large number of hospitals. Since the scrutiny, NEJM has also chosen to retract a Covid-19-related paper which sourced data from this company: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2007621
[1]: The company is choosing to stand behind the data: https://surgisphere.com/2020/05/29/response-to-widespread-re...
Note - I edited this post because it was much more crass and reactionary, and realized its not at all my domain, so I rephrased.
If we are to learn anything from the last 10 years of the replication crisis, it has to be that a single paper is a data point, not a conclusion.
There is a whole field of science dedicated to the statistical analysis of multiple studies in prior literature, e.g. just search for _Meta-analysis_ in the context of medical research.
A state-of-the-art Meta-Analysis is indeed the strongest level of scientific evidence you can have to advise a healthcare decisions or guidelines.
The only purpose of these journals with what they call a high 'impact factor', is that they typically have their peer reviews performed by people who are regarded as the _best_ in the their particular field. Nevertheless, to assume that an expert cannot be conned is also naive.
edit: typo
I highly recommend this elaboration upon that idea: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/12/beware-the-man-of-one-...
As much as we all eagerly drool over and discuss the latest publications -- on this very website! -- in everything from astrophysics to medicine, something being in published in a prestigious journal is not the gold stamp that it is true.
It's just the middle of the process; the reviewers thought it was interesting enough -- and not fraudulent! -- to share with the scientific community at large, and now everyone will examine it, poke holes in it, or try to build on it.
A lot of things are published in journals that end up being wrong. Most of the time it's not fraud, it's just some combination of math errors, experimental errors, and statistical flukes.
And back to the original point: you can find dozens, hundreds of articles published five, ten, twenty years ago that say all sorts of amazing and outlandish things, published in sufficiently minor journals that they didn't receive sufficient attention or follow-up work. Don't take them as gospel just because they got published: you need to study the entire body of scientific research on a subject to understand what the consensus is on what's probably true, what's probably not, and what's in the nebulous zone of unknown.
For the NEJM paper, as for the Lancet paper, the retraction is coming from the authors (including Desai in the NEJM case): https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2021225
When contacted not a single hospital in Australia knew of Surgisphere or the study, and none of them had any commercial relationship with Surgisphere.
To be fair, I wouldn't expect any individual hospital (or individual at the hospital) to be aware of this. Australia has public healthcare and therefore data is stored centrally. There's likely a government department dedicated to data and they would likely be the ones to provide the data, not someone at the hospital.
1) It takes a significant amount of work to format and standardize this data
2) Sharing this data is a business model for hospitals, it's a means of income for hospitals in this day and age. It's not unheard of that a pharma company will pay up double-digit million dollars for this data. It is thus unlikely that top brass for a hospital network is ignorant of the nature of this data and with whom it is being shared.
Speaking from experience. Getting data out of a hospital is phenomenally hard even when the hospital is wants to provide it. Patient confidentiality is a thing they all take very seriously.
Will countries now revert national health policy changes that were based on this questionable study? What about the families of patients who were denied early HCQ treatment based on this study? Who is liable for their denial of treatment?
James Todaro, May 29th, https://www.medicineuncensored.com/a-study-out-of-thin-air
> Misinformation is bad. Misinformation in medicine is worse. Misinformation from a prestigious medical journal is the worst. Herein is a detailed look at the controversial Lancet study that resulted in the World Health Organization ending worldwide clinical trials on hydroxychloroquine in order to focus on patented therapeutics.
Guardian, June 3rd, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/03/covid-19-surgi...
> The very serious concerns being raised about the validity of the papers by Mehra et al need to be recognised and actioned urgently, and ought to bring about serious reflection on whether the quality of editorial and peer review during the pandemic has been adequate. Scientific publication must above all be rigorous and honest. In an emergency, these values are needed more than ever.
James Todaro helped to bring this questionable study to light—his website (https://www.medicineuncensored.com/) and compilation of HCQ studies (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1O6Cls-Oz2ZAgJuyDbnICEGjM...) may be of interest.
>> Who is liable for their denial of treatment?
Doctors base their treatments on the best information they have at hand. In many cases, that information turns out to be faulty.
This retraction does not mean the HCQ works against COVID-19, only that this particular study is no proof that it does not work.
There are five scientific studies demonstrating this for outpatient use.
https://academic.oup.com/aje/advance-article/doi/10.1093/aje...
One of these "studies" is a 2-page Google Doc with no real data. Another is the discredited Raoult study, which is under investigation by the journal [1]. Another study cited is also by Raoult's team. The Brazil study (ref. 29) doesn't seem to have passed peer review (yet?) and has severe methodological flaws. Like the Raoult studies, the Brazil study was not randomized, but makes no attempt to control for confounding by indication or self-selection, such as with propensity score matching or similar methods commonly used in observational studies. The last study cited isn't a study, but an article from a local news station.
The death toll (CFR) in India is suspiciously lower than in the European states. Could it be because they're using Hydroxychroloquine more freely [0]? Though, that hasn't been without controversy [1].
[0] https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-05-india-hydroxychloroqu...
[1] https://science.thewire.in/health/covid-19-indian-council-of...
There are too many other, far more plausible, reasons why the death toll in India looks lower:
* Population pyramid - far fewer people aged 70+ as a percentage of the population means a far lower CFR
* Hotter weather which slows the spread of coronaviruses massively
* More sunlight means less vitamin-D deficiency (which seems to worsen infections)
* Low amount of travel to/from initial seeding spots means closing borders was effective (Wuhan, northern Italy, Alps)
And that is without casting any aspersions about causes of death being attributed correctly.
>According to the ICMR study published in the Indian Journal of Medical Research (IJMR), consumption of four or more maintenance doses was associated with a significant decline (>80%) in the risk of Covid-19 infection among the ‘participants’. The study also found that there was no significant association between HCQ and adverse drug reactions.
https://health.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/pharma/why-...
Link to the preliminary paper http://www.ijmr.org.in/preprintarticle.asp?id=285520
They have yet to publish the results on whether it benefits patients during the early onset of symptoms. [1]
Is hydroxychloroquine paired with zinc in the two studies? That has been the central claim of people supporting hydroxychloroquine this entire time and so far I've yet to see them used together in an early treatment / preventative study in the US (perhaps they've done so in Europe or China?).
[1] "A separate U trial is examining whether it benefits patients after early onset of symptoms, but results haven’t been published."
https://www.startribune.com/anti-malaria-drug-in-u-of-m-tria...
https://academic.oup.com/aje/advance-article/doi/10.1093/aje...
One of these "studies" is a 2-page Google Doc with no real data. Another is the discredited Raoult study, which is under investigation by the journal [1]. Another study cited is also by Raoult's team. The Brazil study (ref. 29) doesn't seem to have passed peer review (yet?) and has severe methodological flaws. Like the Raoult studies, the Brazil study was not randomized, but makes no attempt to control for confounding by indication or self-selection, such as with propensity score matching or similar methods commonly used in observational studies. The last study cited isn't a study, but an article from a local news station.
This is a useful result, but it's not what we've really been wondering. The question of whether HCQ, possibly in combination with antibiotics or zinc and administered early in the infection, reduces the likelihood of getting a serious case.
The Minnesota study has some methodological issues, as well as not enough patients, that made it impossible to draw conclusions about this.
Hopefully, future RCT studies will illuminate this as well. Unless the Lancet paper has poisoned the source of candidates for the study enough that it will be impossible to recruit patients.
Hydroxychloroquine has been used since 1958 by millions of people. It is relatively safely (as much as any drug is safe) used for Malaria, Lupus and Arthritis. Some Lupus users have used it for decades.
The CDC on their web site state it is safe for young, old and pregnant.
https://www.cdc.gov/malaria/resources/pdf/fsp/drugs/hydroxyc...
Take thalidomide for example. Great drug for treating nausea, but not great when that person is also pregnant. By not studying it in this group, it resulted in many people born with birth defects.
Can you point to any studies that shows the safety of hydroxycholorquine in people with respiratory distress or infection?
Can you show any studies that hyrdoxychlorquine is safe when the blood oxygen level drops below certain level often seen in covid patients?
Can I point you to here which shows all the potentially dangerous side effects of hydroxychloroquine?
[1] https://www.pdr.net/drug-summary/Plaquenil-hydroxychloroquin...
Interesting aspect is the following:
> Hydroxychloroquine prolongs the QT interval. Use hydroxychloroquine with caution in patients with conditions that may increase the risk of QT prolongation including congenital long QT syndrome, bradycardia, AV block, heart failure, stress-related cardiomyopathy, myocardial infarction, stroke, hypomagnesemia, hypokalemia, hypocalcemia, or in patients receiving medications known to prolong the QT interval or cause electrolyte imbalances. Females, geriatric patients, patients with sleep deprivation, pheochromocytoma, sickle cell disease, hypothyroidism, hyperparathyroidism, hypothermia, systemic inflammation (e.g., human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection, fever, and some autoimmune diseases including rheumatoid arthritis, systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE), and celiac disease) and patients undergoing apheresis procedures (e.g., plasmapheresis [plasma exchange], cytapheresis) may also be at increased risk for QT prolongation.
And despite what people are saying, there are some nasty side effects for people with cardiovascular issues.
It's worth noting that infants have died with accidental exposure.
https://www.pdr.net/drug-summary/Plaquenil-hydroxychloroquin...
https://rheumatology.medicinematters.com/covid-19/hydroxychl...
> ...James Watson, a statistician at Mahidol who on 28 May published an open letter to the journal and the study’s co-authors, signed by more than 200 clinicians and researchers, that calls for the release of Surgisphere’s hospital-level data, an independent validation of the results, and publication of the peer review comments that led to the Lancet publication.
This blogger's article is dated May 29.
Given that the underlying theme of this blog is "everyone's lying to you about covid19, it's actually not that big of a deal", I doubt James Todaro was as instrumental in The Lancet's retraction as the letter from 200 other researchers the day before.
It will be quite bad if it turns out that the WHO reacted to a study published in The Lancet that turns out to be fraudulent or grossly erroneous. We don't need to make the situation even worse by lending undue credit to other sources of disinformation.
[1]: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/06/mysterious-company-s...
These successful HCQ studies, full of reports of lives saved, are worthy of attention.
But, I'm completely exhausted.
Between arguing against racists and arguing against bad politics during a global health epidemic and trying to catch and counter some of the relentless stream of disinformation on this and so many other subjects -- and all without any intervention at all from any of the social media platforms that enable all of this, including HN -- I'm tired, and discouraged, and dispirited.
I need to go away for a while. I hope someone else has the time and energy to curb stomp random dude's 25 page Google Doc minutes before someone else cites 25 pages of different BS.
If the list of possible scenarios includes death, and people have invested the time to reach informed conclusions in consultation with their doctors, perhaps their choices can be respected.
This doesn't shake my attitude toward science in the slightest, but it does leave me feeling very uninformed. But maybe, just maybe, that is the correct phase-state to be in given the data? Or have I been zone-flooded?
Do you have a link to that research?
We are not shamans.
All drugs have side effects, for example https://www.webmd.com/drugs/2/drug-5482/hydroxychloroquine-o... So each drug is a (small) risk for the patient. The idea of testing the drugs in RCT before using in the patients in the wild is that you can be quite sure that the benefits are greater than the risks.
We spend so much time in science classes learning what past scientists have already proven correct, and people come to believe that that is how science is in general: correct.
But working researchers spend most of their time not knowing what is correct, and sometimes not even knowing how to measure correctness. They wallow in uncertainty; that’s what makes it research.
I mean, now you can understand why the WHO is always putting out statements along the lines of "no evidence yet for X", while random bloggers and HN commentators are already completely convinced of X (or completely convinced against it). Real knowledge takes time. Individual studies don't settle questions.
> “The difficulty seems to be, not so much that we publish unduly in view of the extent and variety of present day interests, but rather that publication has been extended far beyond our present ability to make real use of the record. The summation of human experience is being expanded at a prodigious rate, and the means we use for threading through the consequent maze to the momentarily important item is the same as was used in the days of square-rigged ships.”
- Vannevar Bush, As We May Think (1945): https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-m...
It really , really puts things in perspective and makes me wonder how we are doing much better relatively to most people in ww2 but yet we don't seem to have (or even wish for) a positive outlook on life and the future.
It's best used with zinc and early. That's what five studies confirmed here:
https://academic.oup.com/aje/advance-article/doi/10.1093/aje...
One of these "studies" is a 2-page Google Doc with no real data. Another is the discredited Raoult study, which is under investigation by the journal [1]. Another study cited is also by Raoult's team. The Brazil study (ref. 29) doesn't seem to have passed peer review (yet?) and has severe methodological flaws. Like the Raoult studies, the Brazil study was not randomized, but makes no attempt to control for confounding by indication or self-selection, such as with propensity score matching or similar methods commonly used in observational studies. The last study cited isn't a study, but an article from a local news station.
With HCQ, there are multiple layers of noise to disentangle. Best I've got, and I've been watching this for months, is that HCQ and antivirals, in general are somewhat useful before you get infected or extremely early in the infection. They don't cure anything and nobody expected them to. They're also not appropriate to give to people by the time they show up to the hospital. By then it's too late.
That's general advice that has nothing to do with CV-19. It might be relevant that some of these drugs have been around for over 100 years and while not mundane and harmless, they have well-known safety profiles. (Other drugs that might be included in this group would be Tamiflu, or Acyclovir)
So that's the general advice you might get a year ago if you went out with a doctor and had a couple of beers. As you know, however, the HCQ thing especially got severely political. Suddenly we were seeing studies where doctors gave large doses to ICU patients, and implemented a lot of other protocols that made no sense, probably ended up hurting people, but made for good headlines.
As an outsider, there seemed to be a sort of "competition" in some parts of the academic community to come up with various papers that could technically be called scientific, but existed much more as a publicity vehicle. I could easily count a couple of dozen studies, on various topics, that were not of a high quality. I imagine there are all sorts of reasons for that.
Now we're reaching the apex of this small deviation in the mainstream of scientific research. We've got tons of data of dubious provenance being distributed to various studies to say things we're already primed to hear. It was only because a lot of people took the time to call bullshit that this was caught. Congrats to the folks that did that work.
I have no opinion about any of these drugs, but that's my evaluation of the technical quality of the discussion in the area you bring up. I think the it will eventually will all work out, and it's going to make a hell of a story to tell. But we've got a ways to go yet for all of the systems involved to adapt as they need to. We've made great progress. In many ways, CV-19 was not the pandemic everybody was expecting, and it was quite difficult for many organizations to change gears as quickly as required.
Would anyone else agree?
> Three of the authors of an influential article that found hydroxychloroquine increased the risk of death in COVID-19 patients retracted the study on concerns about the quality of the data....
> Results of a [different] high-quality randomized, placebo-control trial also published yesterday in the New England Journal of Medicine from U.S. and Canadian researchers showed hydroxychloroquine was no better than placebo pills at preventing illness from the coronavirus.
It's a little understatement when the accusations are they made up the data.
The retraction is by the study authors. The data is from a company that's entirely different, and that company claims their data is "proprietary" and they can't share it.
There's strong suspicion that that proprietary data is in fact made up, but the study authors cannot prove it. And you really don't want to retract a study by making unproven allegations.
"We can't vouch for the veracity" is all they can truthfully say.
For the full statement: "“Our independent peer reviewers informed us that Surgisphere would not transfer the full dataset, client contracts, and the full ISO audit report to their servers for analysis as such transfer would violate client agreements and confidentiality requirements. As such, our reviewers were not able to conduct an independent and private peer review and therefore notified us of their withdrawal from the peer-review process.”[1]
The authors tried for an independent audit. Surgisphere failed to cooperate. Given the history of its principal, not a surprise.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/04/covid-19-lance...
In any case, even if he wasn't, the other three dunces should never have trusted such dubious data.
Now it appears this has happened again.
Even though the retraction was quick, the damage to future research is permanent. If this was in fact a propaganda operation rather than just incompetence, pride and an unethical career gambit, it was an incredibly successful one.
When someone fakes data to this degree, in a case that has this level of immediate real-world impact, one has to question the motivation behind it. Hope this gets illuminated during the investigation, but I'm not holding my breath.
They claimed that hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine both caused more deaths. The study claimed a huge effect size (~20% increase in death rate) and a giant sample (14888 treated, 81144 control across 671 hospitals). Despite not being a proper blinded trial, this still appeared to be strong evidence and sufficient to stop any reasonable doctor who heard of this study from giving these drugs to patients. If the evidence was fabricated, that’s a big deal.
https://academic.oup.com/aje/advance-article/doi/10.1093/aje...
The real argument there is "It appears that the FDA, NIH and cardiology society positions have been based upon theoretical calculations about potential adverse events and from measured physiologic changes rather than from current real-world mortality experience with these medications and that their positions should be revised." The author is arguing that while this drug combination does cause measurable heart damage, it's worth it because the overall near-term mortality decreases. That may or may not be justified, but it's a much weaker statement than the paper title would suggest.
Some of the citations are a bit strange. One is to a letter on Google Drive.[1]
[1] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1pjgHlqI-ZuKOziN3txQsN5zz...
[1] https://retractionwatch.com/2020/04/06/hydroxychlorine-covid...
In addition to this retraction, 3 of the top 10 most cited retracted papers of all time were published in the Lancet. [0] This includes the infamous Wakefield "vaccines cause autism" paper which is probably the most damaging scientific fraud of the last several decades.
On the editorial side, they've become quite outspoken on political matters [1], publishing one piece calling for the ban of tobacco, a letter expressing strong opinions on the Israel/Palestine conflict, and a piece just a couple weeks ago calling for Americans to vote Trump out of office. The also published a rather controversial study that provided very high estimates of the civilian death toll of the Iraq War. I'm inclined to agree with their position on some issues and disagree with it on others, but either way they seem to court controversy.
All of this has been under the same editor, Richard Horton (who is himself quite outspoken.) Put it all together, and the picture that emerges is a publication that values making a splash (whether by publishing shocking results or by taking a position on political issues) over getting things correct. That's irritating behavior in a tabloid. In a prestigious journal, it's horrifyingly irresponsible.
[0] https://retractionwatch.com/the-retraction-watch-leaderboard...
That is what is wrong with platforms like Google and Facebook adopting the role of fact-checkers.
I think the even bigger danger here is when people want to point out flaws in policies like Section 230 and Net Neutrality. The incentives are huge for these companies to either bury or suppress dissenting views that impact their bottom lines.
Along with that little problem of Google and Facebook being aggressive monopolies capable of wiping you off the Internet as a presence to an extent that whatever you're trying to publish will barely exist online (G search, gone; YouTube, gone; FB, gone; Instagram, gone; WhatsApp, gone).
Five monopoly positions on critical speech platforms between the two of them.
Those two monopolies have more totalitarian speech restriction capabilities than the US Government does by a dramatic margin. They should be broken up and regulated accordingly, due to their monopoly positions de facto putting them into the role of censor.
So far I've seen a lot of self-correction done by the scientific and medical communities themselves. There hasn't been a single example of a nontrivial story broken by a guy delivering spittle-flecked rants on Youtube. The ranters, however, are very good at taking credit for what actual scientists did.
But that's not really the point. Doesn't it bother you even a little bit that you might be barred from posting a valid critique of a bogus study?
This added color detracts from your comment's point. It's the kind of thing that would be included in, well, a spittle-flecked YouTube rant.
HN Commenter: claims no one YouTube did anything to help change conversation about topic. Uses this to validate YouTube censorship.
That’s some Catch-22 type stuff.
This is the type of “Only the experts can decide for us... attitude that people are fed up with. A cabal of experts should not get to decide which theories I want to read about by simply labeling them as wrong or crack pot conspiracies.
Why should I be limited to the source material? Why can’t I watch a video of someone discussing the topic and providing their own analysis?
What gets taken down is spittle-flecked rants about how COVID-19 was created by Bill Gates and Anthony Fauci to bring about the Biblical apocalypse, but can be cured by drinking bleach, but simultaneously it doesn't even exist.
In fact I heard about that flawed paper from a Youtube video.
Plandemic is probably a stupid movie. I haven't seen it, so I cannot judge. Regardless, it has been scrubbed from Google Drive accounts by the powers that be!
Misinformation about coronavirus finds new avenues on unexpected sites (WaPo) http://archive.today/wKfVi
What kind of automated or intentional interference might researchers face in the future when Google or Facebook has already decided on the facts?
P.S. The crazy thing about the Plandemic take down is that it is driven by someone trying to license their content removal patent to the oligopoly. The WaPo reporter never even bothered to research that, or if she did, she didn't disclose that fact in her article! Another hidden business interest.
https://adage.com/article/digital/eric-feinberg-man-google-y...
Good grief. Why are urban legends so hard to kill? There is no such policy. There never was.
The source of that bit of ginned-up outrage was an informal interview (when I looked this up earlier, there wasn't even video or a transcript available anywhere!) where someone senior was asked about what Youtube's criteria were for vetting advice in the face of the pandemic. And the answer was a hand-wavy thing about how anything that was clearly wrong, or clearly dangerous, and one of the examples given was about medical advice that clearly runs counter to existing health care bodies like the WHO.
And that's as far as it went. There never was a policy about the WHO. To my knowledge no video was ever removed because of a conflict with the WHO.
The whole point wasn't to nitpick about exactly what the WHO said, it was to reference the fact that Youtube would adhere to expert consensus where possible.
> That is what is wrong with platforms like Google and Facebook adopting the role of fact-checkers.
The irony there is that, had Google or Facebook or someone taken on that role, you wouldn't have internalized this fake fact because whoever it was that spun it to you wouldn't have had an audience. But they didn't. So you got lied to.
Which is better?
There is a widespread misunderstanding of the YouTube removal reasons. Bad faith actors are spreading these rumors and creating conditions to falsely claim censorship.
For example, most "alt-right" videos and users were removed due to their targeted harassment of other users. But they mix it in a larger video and then claim that YouTube removed the video for the generalized content. This is a bad faith argument, and they know what they are doing.
"Anything that would go against World Health Organization recommendations would be a violation of our policy." - YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki
> To my knowledge no video was ever removed because of a conflict with the WHO.
"Sharyl Attkisson, host of the nationally syndicated news magazine TV show "Full Measure" had her story about "politicizing COVID-19 medicine" pulled by YouTube, because the video service deemed it 'dangerous.' The issue was that one doctor said that hydroxychloroquine still needed to be studied."
https://abc3340.com/news/nation-world/youtube-reinstates-hyd...
As far as the video you linked: it was reinstated. That's right there in the headline of the article you linked. They messed up, and put it back. Isn't that saying that their actual policy is the opposite of what you claim?
>YouTube doesn't allow content that spreads medical misinformation that contradicts the World Health Organization (WHO) or local health authorities’ medical information about COVID-19
What if local health authorities contradict WHO medical information?
Google's mission used to be to organize the world's information. Now they seem to be want to go way beyond that.
>What if local health authorities contradict WHO medical information?
Simple: then you're not allowed to upload videos on those topics at all.
That story ran six weeks ago, and there's been no corroboration of that "policy" by any other source in any other media. It's all a bunch of huffing about this one out-of-context, apparently off-the-cuff (quote. So yeah, I think that's pretty much the definition of "grossly misrepresented".
Not quite. Before there's more back and forth about some interview and what that meant, let's quote the actual policy, and focus the discussion on that?
from https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/9891785 :
> YouTube doesn't allow content that spreads medical misinformation that contradicts the World Health Organization (WHO) or local health authorities’ medical information about COVID-19. This is limited to content that contradicts WHO or local health authorities’ guidance on:
- Treatment
- Prevention
- Diagnostic
- Transmission
followed by a long list of examples
https://www.change.org/p/youtube-tell-youtube-to-letusdecide...
Trump was fact checked by Twitter a few weeks ago for claiming mail in ballots are linked to voter fraud [1]. In reality, there have been several hundred cases of mail in voter fraud, though certainly the convicted cases are rare on a percentage basis (though actual cases are unknown).[2]
Many thousands are today posting about how black people are being continuously killed by police, but yet no Twitter fact checks. In reality, just 10 unarmed black men were killed by the police last year.[3]
Can anyone here imagine Twitter putting up a fact check saying "Misrepresentation/exaggeration: Only 10 unarmed black men were killed by police last year"?
Is it just a coincidence that Twitter is a company who's employees lean heavily left and their policies also lean heavily left? What would a conservatively run Twitter look like with fact checks, and would you be comfortable with that?
[1] https://twitter.com/i/events/1265330601034256384?lang=en [2] https://www.factcheck.org/2020/05/more-false-mail-in-ballot-... [3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/national/police...
Need to clarify (for those harsh to judge) that I am in no way comparing the severity or tragic nature of fraud vs killing, just Twitter's response to various facts on its platform.
The later goes against the specific rules in Twitter's "civic integrity policy" that try to prevent to use of Twitter to spread misinformation that can result in voter suppression.
You can say falsely say election was rigged but you cannot falsely say that a poling location was closed (at least on Twitter).
But disagree on the other point of their fact check - which goes with my argument. Here is the quote from the top of their fact check of his tweet:
"Trump makes unsubstantiated claim that mail-in ballots will lead to voter fraud
On Tuesday, President Trump made a series of claims about potential voter fraud after California Governor Gavin Newsom announced an effort to expand mail-in voting in California during the COVID-19 pandemic. These claims are unsubstantiated, according to CNN, Washington Post and others. Experts say mail-in ballots are very rarely linked to voter fraud."
This quote could literally be written to disprove any of a number of liberal arguments - but yet curiously isn't.
Isn't that 10 way too many and the whole point of the current protests.
Twitter made the case that Trump's tweet was false by saying "These claims are unsubstantiated, according to CNN, Washington Post and others. Experts say mail-in ballots are very rarely linked to voter fraud."
Why can't that statement be rewritten to say that "Experts say that police killings of unarmed black men are very rare".
and most of those 10 were attacking police officers when they were killed
Do note that IIRC, this is 10 unarmed black men shot by the police though, since non-shooting deaths aren't properly tracked. So Imperfect data collection could be an issue here.
And on the too many side, I think that 1 is too many, but unfortunately, the nature of the american enforcement landscape (and I don't mean police attitudes here, I mean prevalence of guns) mean that mistakes fundamentally more likely than in most other countries.
I'm not sure this was the motivating factor for these initial protests.
Now it may have morphed into this over time, but I think they started on much simpler terms.
The world watch as a police officer kill someone and then watch as the authorities did very little about it (i.e. getting sacked for killing someone is a rather strange form of punishment).
The protests where in response to that poor attempted by the authorities to serve up justice for what is an obvious act of manslaughter if not murder.
Do you realize how you moved the goalpost? The second sentence does not contradict the first one ...
From similar stats, about 240 (24% of 1000 total) black people were killed by the police.
Of course some of the armed ones are unjustified (for example, the tragic and imo unjustified Philando Castile shooting counts as armed) and some of the unarmed ones are likely justified.
"yet again, another unarmed black man was killed by the police" is the typical refrain and the narrative the protestors are screaming and tweeting.
The president of the united states made this front page news by boosting the drug in a context where there was minimal evidence that it helped. That's newsworthy. It just is. The same principle that gets his statements on the front page gets refutations there too. It's news if he's right. It's news if he's wrong.
I mean... what would your preferred action be? Not cover newsworthy science? Not cover the statements of the president? Or do you just not want them to cover stuff you personally disagree with?
In reality: they covered the president, they covered the result, and they covered the retraction. All with pretty solid reach, frankly. We're literally yelling about it right now.
This is from the CDC web site: safe for young, old and pregnant:
https://www.cdc.gov/malaria/resources/pdf/fsp/drugs/hydroxyc...
However, the same day the New England Journal of Medicine published results from a new double-blind randomized, placebo-controlled trial which found hydroxychloroquine didn't help prevent people exposed to others with Covid-19 from developing the disease. One of the study's co-authors said that as a preventative agent, "It doesn't seem to work."
https://science.slashdot.org/story/20/05/23/0140202/study-of...
Government entities hardly exempt from self-serving bias and manipulation.
No conspiracy theory here, there's nothing sure, but we can't rule it out completely either.
https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2020/06/02/su...
To answer your question, there can be an economic interest in claiming a competitor treatment (which is generic and manufactured cheaply) doesn't work.
Just because a President, or any man, is bad, doesn't automatically mean that every word he says is wrong. And if he really is that bad, why is it necessary to fabricate studies out of thin air in order to discredit something he said, complete with people dying because they couldn't get a medication that might have helped. If he is actually bad, the actual facts should be plenty to demonstrate it.
This doesn't even seem like a "conspiracy theory" to me. If you want to get into conspiracy theories, you'd have to start asking what else is getting this treatment.
https://academic.oup.com/aje/advance-article/doi/10.1093/aje...
One of these "studies" is a 2-page Google Doc with no real data. Another is the discredited Raoult study, which is under investigation by the journal [1]. Another study cited is also by Raoult's team. The Brazil study (ref. 29) doesn't seem to have passed peer review (yet?) and has severe methodological flaws. Like the Raoult studies, the Brazil study was not randomized, but makes no attempt to control for confounding by indication or self-selection, such as with propensity score matching or similar methods commonly used in observational studies. The last study cited isn't a study, but an article from a local news station.