ranked? Who ranks them? rivals? You can stick with it if you like but the study is flawed.
Did you know the paper that appears to have triggered the Trump administration's obsession with hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for infection with the novel coronavirus has received a statement of concern from the society that publishes the journal in which the work appeared?
https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/928336
here it is -According to a
statement issued April 3 by the International Society of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy (ISAC), the vanguard study cited by Trump and others in their endorsement of hydroxychloroquine “
does not meet the Society’s expected standard, especially relating to the lack of better explanations of the inclusion criteria and the triage of patients to ensure patient safety.”
https://www.the-scientist.com/news-...concerned-over-hydroxychloroquine-study-67405
So argue with them, not me.
I’ve already posted an article explaining the problems with that study and the reasons why other medical experts want proper testing. I’ll post it again.
This article describes why that study was so flawed
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/06/hydroxychloroquine-trump-coronavirus-drug
here are the specific reasons why that study was flawed and misreported on Fox News and talk radio
The treatment group and the control group were drawn from separate populations: the treatment group were all patients at the institution where the researchers worked, the Méditerranée Infection University Hospital Institute in Marseille, while the control patients came from other hospitals in the south of France.
The treatment group (mean age 51.2) was significantly older than the control group (mean age 37.3), introducing another variable that could undermine the meaning of the results. The study was “open label”, meaning the physicians and patients knew which treatment they were receiving. The French researchers also treated some but not all of the treatment group patients with azithromycin, a common antibiotic, another complicating factor that was not randomized.
But even more important than these shortcomings in the design of the study is how the researchers chose to measure and report their results. Forty-two patients were initially included in the study. Three were transferred to the intensive care unit; one died, one left the hospital, and one stopped taking the treatment due to nausea. The other 36 eventually recovered, and those who received the drug cleared the virus from the system faster than those who did not.
If you had only heard about this study from the Fox News assertion of a “100% cure rate”, you might assume that the four patients with poor clinical outcomes (the three ICU visits and one death) had been unlucky enough to be in the group that did not receive the “cure”.
And yet, those four patients, as well as the patient with nausea and the one who left the hospital early, were all part of the treatment group. They were excluded from the topline results of the study because of the way that the researchers chose to measure and report the results: strictly based on the measurable presence of viruses in nasal swabs taken each day of the study. Since the patients were in the ICU or dead, their samples could not be taken and they were left out of the final analysis. Based on the nasal swabs of just the 36 patients who completed the study, those who received the drug cleared the virus from their systems faster than those who did not.