‘This was… Not a large study…’
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) Left-wing attempts to discredit President Donald Trump’s highly touted coronavirus treatment faced new setbacks after a widely circulated recent “study” from a veterans hospital that claimed to debunk it raised several red flags.
While the efficacy and potential downsides to the hydroxychloroquine treatment (in combination with other drugs) continue to be studied and debated, proponents who have successfully used it have built a strong case on anecdotal evidence.
But partisan, anti-Trump resisters, including members of the federal bureaucracy’s scientific community, have pushed back brutally at Trump’s usurpation of their authority during the national emergency, according to the Gateway Pundit.
In one instance, left-wing activists deliberately poisoned themselves with aquarium cleaner as part of an effort to spread misinformation in the media that would discredit the president.
More recently, media outlets hyped a retrospective analysis of 368 patients at a VA hospital that claimed hydroxychloroquine treatments offered no benefit and resulted in an increased death rate.
However, several flaws in the study were apparent upon further scrutiny.
Among them was the lack of randomization, which signaled that those receiving the treatment as a last resort may already have been in their final stages and predisposed to the dire outcome.
The VA itself released a statement acknowledging that the study “doesn’t adjust for patients’ clinical status.”
The study’s small and unreliable sample size also left some wondering why Trump-bashers were so ready to cite it as definitive proof that Trump had blood on his hands.
This was… Not a large study. https://t.co/tqCkL0iBUI
— Pradheep J. Shanker (@Neoavatara) April 22, 2020
Furthermore, at least two of the study’s authors also acknowledged competing interests—including University of Virginia researcher Jayakrishna Ambati, who has filed his own patent for an “unrelated” COVID treatment.
Co-researcher S. Scott Sutton, a University of South Carolina pharmacologist, has received research grants from Gilead Sciences, which is currently developing the competing drug remdesivir for approved COVID treatment.
Remdesivir has been touted by the World Health Organization as the “only one … that we think may have real efficacy,” according to CNN. Gilead is currently conducting health trials on it in China.
The VA study also contradicted several others that weighed in favor of the treatment, including replicated clinical trials involving more than 1,000 patients by French epidemiologist Didier Raoult, which found 91 percent effectiveness.
Fox News’s The Ingraham Angle tore into the fake news reports for rushing to conclusions without digging deeper.