FDA ‘Grossly Misrepresented’ Blood Plasma Data, Scientists Say

nytimes.com

7 points·rayhendricks··3 comments

COVID is one of the most significant geopolitical crises of the last 100 years. It is naïve to imagine that the US Government is not engaging in top secret COVID research at the highest levels. Instead of burying our heads in the sand and claiming that a life-saving treatment is suspect because a spokesperson can't literally point to a statistic in a publicly available report, we should rejoice that our President is doing cutting-edge research into medical innovation to save the lives of American people.

1. It’s not about “top secret research”. This is about misrepresentation of research undertaken by the Mayo Clinic.

2. It’s not just that a spokesman can’t point to the statistic - it’s that scientists can’t work out retrospectively where the statistic came from, and their best guess where it did come from suggests that the president and the FDA commissioner were wrong, and exaggerated the benefits of the treatment.

3. It’s great if the US Govt is supporting COVID research. But it’s terrible if they then politicise the research, and lie/exaggerate the benefits that the research might have shown for political reasons.

4. Put simply, when the FDA gets things wrong, it’s likely that patients are harmed or killed. In this case it’s probably not so bad, but political interference in the process of approving drugs and treatments for patients is a frightening situation, and not one that any reputable politician should be anywhere near.

Your president isn't doing research of any sort, much less the cutting-edge sort.

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