Media Should Do a Mea Culpa as French Analysis Offers a Stunning Observation About Hydroxychloroquine Use

We have been told repeatedly by health experts to demonstrate the effectiveness of hydroxychloroquine and the other meds prescribed with it we need strict clinical trials. 

These are studies where some patients receive medication, and some do not. For many healthcare providers, this is a noxious thought if there is evidence to believe a treatment may work. 

How do you ethically deny a potential treatment to an eligible patient to conduct a study? So-called double-blind studies described above are the preferred method advocated by Dr. Fauci. 

These double-blind studies allow people to die in the name of “science” if a drug is effective. They are in the “control group.” 

There are ethical issues with this approach that researches at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center addressed with a new concurrent trial based on machine learning developed following the H1N1 pandemic. 

This method has been ignored by the NIH and FDA approval processes. Such was the fate of the hydroxychloroquine, azithromycin, and zinc combination. Scientifically there was every reason to believe it would work. 

Clinically, doctors saw results when directly treating patients. Several recommended that the drug be produced in sufficient amounts and given early and outpatient. P 

resident Trump expressed optimism based on studies in France and China, and the media freaked out. 

The president’s political opposition would go on to cling to any proof the drug would not work and suppress any information that it would. This politicization culminated in the horrific study published by Lancet that the publication quietly retracted. However, the damage was already done. 

The World Health Organization suspended trials immediately after the study published in Lancet. Switzerland, which had been using the treatment, prohibited the use of the drug in COVID-19 shortly after that on May 27th. The retraction was so stealth that the ban was not lifted in Switzerland until June 11th. 

This window allowed French researchers to analyze what happened in the entire population of COVID-19 patients during the ban. They used the case fatality rate (CFR) as the measure observed. The graph is stunning.

It also the only period where the Swiss CFR approached or exceeded that in France where there has been no use of hydroxychloroquine outside a few isolated trials.